Journalist and Author
My college boyfriend and I used to have this conversation: Me: “I’m so broke.” Him: “Yeah, me too.” Which was almost always followed, a few days later, by this conversation: Him: “Let’s go get a beer.” Me: “I thought you said you were broke?” Him (after a puzzled pause): “Well, yeah, I was. But then […]
Here’s a little tip that will make you feel like a public-health insider. The next time you read any news related to foodborne illness in the United States, look for this word: Minnesota. The chances are good that you’ll find it, probably buried deep in the footnotes. That’s not because Minnesota has particularly unhealthy food. […]
File under: Really not good news. Deep in the back of the weekly bulletin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a note that NDM-1, the “Indian supergene,” has been isolated from a patient in a U.S. military field hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan. It’s been a few months since NDM-1 was in […]
The stream of news from the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany has been so steady that it’s been hard to catch my breath long enough to post on it. The Robert Koch Institute in Germany said today that they think the epidemic curve is cresting, which makes me unusually late to the party. Nevertheless, […]
Read More: Excerpt Part One Excerpt Part Two Tomorrow — June 5, 2011 — marks the 30th anniversary of the first recognition of the HIV epidemic. In honor of the occasion, I’m running excerpts from Beating Back the Devil, my 2004 book on the CDC’s disease-detective corps, because of one them wrote that first paper […]
Despite the massive AIDS anniversary this week, I was expecting to write about the EU E. coli outbreak next. But there’s striking new news on MRSA that makes it worth putting off E. coli one more day. I’m traveling many time zones away from home, though, so this will be quick. Researchers in England and […]
Read More: Excerpt Part One Excerpt Part Three This Sunday — June 5, 2011 — marks the 30th anniversary of the first recognition of the HIV epidemic. In honor of the occasion, I’m running excerpts from Beating Back the Devil, my 2004 book on the CDC’s disease-detective corps, because of one them wrote that first […]
This Sunday — June 5, 2011 — marks what public health considers the 30th anniversary of the international epidemic of HIV-AIDS. If you’d like a summation of the past 30 years, Larry Altman, the retired senior medical writer of the New York Times, did an excellent job last Tuesday. And the Centers for Disease Control […]
(Sorry for the radio silence, constant listeners. It’s been a challenging few weeks at Casa Superbug, with a death in the family and the chaos afterward of catching up to the rest of life. But back now, with some interesting stuff planned for later this week.) Last week was the General Meeting of the American […]
A little less than a year ago, the Food and Drug Administration took a step that, depending on your point of view, was either far too activist or nowhere-near-enough-but-good-try: It proposed, in a draft document, that the agricultural industry voluntarily restrict its use of growth-promoting micro-doses of antibiotics. It was a significant step. The FDA […]
Being Scary Disease Girl, I seem to have earned a reputation for never wincing in the face of weird disease threats. But this, I admit, makes me go squick: Researchers in Vancouver, BC have found bedbugs there carrying drug-resistant staph, MRSA, and vancomycin-resistant enterococci, VRE. (Deep breath.) (Another deep breath.) OK, details:
It’s been just about seven years since an alert epidemiologist in the Dutch town of Nijmegen identified an aberrant strain of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in a toddler who was going in for surgery to fix a hole in her heart. The strain was odd because it didn’t behave normally on the standard identifying tests, and […]
In December 2007, I flew to Chicago to meet the team of researchers who spotted the first known cases of community-associated MRSA in the US in the mid-1990s, and who have been agitating ever since for recognition and action to beat back the rising tide of antibiotic resistance. It was grey and snowy outside their […]
Every once in a while, there’s news of a measles outbreak. On the surface, they don’t involve large numbers of cases — there’s one in Minneapolis right now that has racked up 21 cases so far — and so people seem to wonder why these outbreaks are such a big deal. Here’s one reason why: […]
So if we wanted to reduce the danger of pathogens passing to people via food — not just drug-resistant bacteria, which are an increasingly significant problem, but all disease-causing ones — where to start? Formulating a strategy is more difficult than it seems. In the US, policing food safety is divided among several federal agencies: […]
We had scary-bad weather in the Southeast the past two days. Thankfully, there was no serious damage where I am, but the devastation to the north and west is appalling, with about 180 300 deaths so far. Please spare a thought for them. It’s going to take me a while to haul my working materials […]
Much of the contentious debate over abuse of antibiotics in farming boils down to a couple of simple questions: Whether resistant organisms that arise on farms because of antibiotic use leave the farm, and whether, once they do, they reach human beings. A piece of research due to be released this morning in the journal […]
A swiftly moving contagious disease threatens children. The government urges parents to vaccinate. But parents are suspicious: They believe the vaccine has unpredictable side-effects and they distrust the government’s motives. When persuasion fails, coercion takes its place. The government demands vaccination — and a showdown looms. In many aspects, that vignette sounds like today, when […]
So if we agree that the untrammeled rise in antibiotic resistance is a bad thing — and given the unexpected World Health Day news that an incredibly resistant bacterium is in New Delhi’s water supply, I think many do agree — what do we do next? How about charging everyone who buys an antibiotic a […]
Last fall, not long after the bloom of news about the “Indian superbug” NDM-1 — a newly identified enzyme that renders common gut bacteria indifferent to almost all antibiotics — I spoke to one of its lead researchers, Timothy Walsh of the University of Cardiff, about next steps in their research. His work and his […]