Journalist and Author
Tomorrow, Thursday, is World Health Day, an annual observance that the World Health Organization uses to focus attention on some critical global-health issue. This year, they’ve chosen antimicrobial resistance as the issue that most needs highlighting. Noting the choice, the Lancet editorialized: “Resistance has joined the front rank of global health concerns.” On the day, […]
The news on polio eradication — the almost 30-year up-and-down struggle to make polio the second human disease, after smallpox, to be eradicated from the planet — recently has been wonderful. The case numbers are seesawing — fewer in the four countries where the disease remains endemic, more in the countries where has recently crept […]
Remember NDM-1, the “Indian supergene” that created a media furor last fall and then fell below the news horizon? This is worse. I have a story in the April Scientific American (“The Enemy Within,” just previewed online) about a new and very troubling form of antibiotic resistance: Carbapenem resistance, spreading through Gram-negative bacteria such as […]
In China, more than 2,000 tons of fresh pork and pork products — at a minimum, 4 million pounds — have been recalled because the meat has tested positive for clenbuterol, a stimulant that is illegal in food-producing animals not only in China but in Europe and the United States. Another 1.6 million pigs are […]
It’s World TB Day: 129 years ago today, Robert Koch announced the identification of the tuberculosis bacillus. It must have looked, back then, as though solving TB — effectively the AIDS of the 19th century, the disease that took leading artists and writers in the prime of their creative lives and inspired novels, poems and […]
Beannachtai lá le Pádraig, constant readers — or, for you English-speaking lot, Happy St. Patrick’s Day. In Irish, the way to say “Once upon a time” is O fadó fadó — “Long, long ago…” So, for St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish story: Long, long ago — or, by the calendar, in 1824 — the territory […]
As I told you a few weeks ago, my book SUPERBUG (Free Press 2010) is out in paperback. Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.com has very kindly put up an interview and podcast about it. And Joanne Manaster, AKA @ScienceGoddess, has done one of her excellent and charming book review videos, calling it “not for the faint […]
I am bashfully flattered to report that this blog has inspired, and been quoted in, an episode of the webcomic Lola Lollipop: Big-eyed kids, talking animals, nutrition, sustainability, and major cute. And, umm, me. Huge thanks to Lola!
You have to love a scientific commentary that starts this in-your-face: “Show us the science that use of antibiotics in animal production is causing this antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner of the National Pork Council told the Washington Post back in June 2010, responding to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance document advising against the […]
So, antibiotics. Given to farm animals. (Yeah, that again.) How does that work, anyway? Pills? Injections? Daily massage with specially compounded creams? Not quite. Farm animals overwhelmingly get antibiotics in their feed. (You knew that.) And a new paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives explains what a bad idea that is: Animals that are […]
Important news from the CDC Tuesday: A particularly deadly kind of hospital-acquired infection, CLABSIs — central line-associated bloodstream infections — was sharply suppressed across the 2000s. There were an estimated 43,000 in intensive-care unit patients in 2001 and an estimated 18,000 in 2009, a drop of 58 percent. That’s excellent: Up to one out of […]
Do you let your dog sleep on your bed? You do, don’t you? Once you read this story, you might want to rethink that. There were only two cases of bubonic plague in humans in the United States last year. They were two people, unidentified except for their ages — 17 and 42 — who […]
Perhaps you remember the Great Tomato Scare of 2008. It started in mid-May, when the New Mexico Department of Health told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it had identified a Salmonella cluster: four people who were infected with an identical, uncommon strain called Salmonella Saintpaul, and another 15 who seemed to be […]
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Congress’s only microbiologist, said late today that she plans shortly to reintroduce PAMTA, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, a timely move given the collapsing antibiotic market (see this morning’s post) and continuing reports of resistance moving off farms (as in this post). PAMTA would direct the FDA to […]
Last night, the Journal of the American Medical Association posted ahead of print an editorial by Dr. James Hughes, former director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the CDC and now a professor of medicine and global health at Emory University. It’s a blunt and eloquent plea for attention to a problem that […]
When I talk about farming, I usually focus on antibiotic over-use and the way that it stimulates the emergence of drug-resistant organisms. That’s part of what my recent book is about, and to me, it’s the critical piece in the entire discussion of industrial-scale agriculture. If we didn’t use antibiotics in such vast quantities, confined […]
I have a story in the forthcoming March issue of SELF Magazine that has just been put up online: The Rising Dangers of Ticks. It’s a long look at the under-appreciated other diseases that can be transmitted by tick bites — that is, not the Lyme disease that most people associate with ticks, but babesiosis, […]
When we talk about the emergence of antibiotic resistance, two factors usually get the blame: the overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and in agriculture. In both cases, the drugs’ presence exert selective pressure on bacteria, encouraging them to develop or acquire resistance genes that will protect them. But there’s another way that bacteria are […]
Two days ago, the acclaimed British science journalist and blogger, Ed Yong, published a post titled I think you have all you need for a blog. This detailed an e-mail exchange with a public information officer who’d been approached for, surprisingly enough, information for a story. The PIO was – let’s say – reluctant to […]
There’s an ingrained perception that journalists and public-affairs or public-information officers (PIOs for short) loathe each other, with reporters always pushing for more and PIOs always wanting to limit access. In my experience, it’s a mostly false impression: Smart and experienced reporters understand that PIOs can be useful translators for the institutions they represent, and […]