Journalist and Author
CBC News, the Canadian national TV network, has caused a stir in the food-blog world with the results of a nationwide investigation that found antibiotic-resistant bacteria contaminating supermarket chicken. In its words: Chicken bought at major supermarkets across Canada is frequently contaminated with superbugs — bacteria that many antibiotics cannot kill — an investigation by […]
A brief pause for self-promotion: My 2010 book SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster) has been released in paperback! SUPERBUG tells, for the first time, the full 50-year history of the emergence of drug-resistant staph, MRSA, in overlapping epidemics in hospitals and health care, schools and families, and farm animals and […]
The New England Journal of Medicine last week published the results of a Phase 3 trial of a new antibiotic called fidaxomicin, made by a company called Optimer Pharmacuticals. Fidaxomicin is the first of a new class of antibiotics called macrocycles; it’s a narrow-spectrum drug aimed specifically at Clostridium difficile, the bacterial, toxin-producing, potentially fatal […]
Well, wow. National legislators stand up to oppose the use of tax revenues to subsidize large-scale confinement pig farms out of concern for food safety and antibiotic resistance, declaring that they are “going to war in defense of pigs.” In Europe, though. At the European Parliament today, three national representatives — Janusz Wojciechowski of Poland, […]
What if there were a food whose consumption carried a predictable risk of contracting a fatal illness? What if consumption of that food were so deeply embedded in a culture that there was no chance of stopping people from eating it? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the dilemma facing Arctic indigenous communities and health authorities […]
When it comes to the impact of farm antibiotics on human health, there’s a data gap. That the use of antibiotics on conventional/confinement farms provokes the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria really isn’t in dispute; it’s been proven, over and over again, for about 30 years now. (Here’s a long bibliography from the Pew Charitable Trusts […]
It’s been two weeks since the one-year anniversary of the devastating Haitian earthquake, and the ongoing crisis in that desperately poor island has once again sunk below the news-radar horizon. Which is of course outrageous: Most of the infrastructure has still not been rebuilt, and 800,000 people are still living in tent cities parked precariously […]
Girly confession: I love makeup. I cannot get through an airport in Asia without hitting the cosmetics kiosks. I spent a half-day in Paris last summer tracking down a cult eyeshadow shade. I once lured every woman in my newsroom into testing long-wearing lipsticks against caffeine, pizza and a workout in the building’s gym. But […]
It’s been so long since ScienceOnline 2011 (started a week ago, ended Sunday) that I am almost embarrassed to post on it. (It was a long drive. I came back to monster deadlines. I’m moving. OK, enough sniveling.) But as I mentioned last week, I was involved at the conference in a discussion about how […]
Along with a majority of my Wired Science colleagues, I’ll be in North Carolina this weekend attending and speaking at Science Online 2011, a crazy-intense weekend that some smart person called the Bonnaroo of science blogging. SciO11 draws “scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide […]
Since the first identification in 2004 of MRSA ST398, also known as “pig MRSA” or livestock-associated MRSA (archives of posts here and here), that drug-resistant organism has been found being carried asymptomatically by farm workers and veterinarians, and causing illness in health care workers, hospital patients, and people with no known ties to agriculture. One […]
Pretty much every disease-detection geek — which includes me, since I wrote a book about disease detectives — has read, at some point, the story “Eleven Blue Men” by Berton Roueche. Roueche was a journalist who worked for the New Yorker for almost 50 years, and for most of that time, he was responsible for […]
For my book SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (came out last March; paperback will be out in February), I spent several years talking to about 100 victims of antibiotic-resistant staph, and family members of victims who did not survive their infections. There were some striking things about their stories. One was the variability of […]
By, now, 24 hours later, I imagine that everyone who cares about the subject has read or heard about the BMJ’s masterful assessment and rejection of the original paper that linked childhood vaccines and autism, calling it an “elaborate fraud” perpetrated by a researcher who had entered into a relationship with class-action attorneys. (Here are […]
So it looks like the researchers who named NDM-1 — New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, the “Indian super-enzyme” that renders common gut bacteria impervious to all but one or two antibiotics — were right all along. According to a study just published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, the problematic gene that produces it has been circulating in […]
What a difference a year makes: At about this time in 2009, the world was still in the midst of the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic, though cases had already trended down from their fall peak. Here at the end of 2010, flu has made barely a ripple. In the United States, seasonal flu has been […]
Two weeks ago, I broke the news of a new FDA report that estimated for the first time the amount of antibiotics sold in the United States every year for use in agriculture: 28.8 million pounds. That long-awaited report didn’t answer a crucial question: What volume of antibiotics are sold in the United States each […]
In a nailbiter ending tonight, the US House of Representatives passed the long-stalled, almost-lost, back-from-the-dead FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, a decades-overdue piece of legislation that will equip the US Food and Drug Administration with enforcement tools to help it prevent and track foodborne illness outbreaks. For people who don’t know the regulatory landscape of […]
It’s one of the touchiest topics under the broad category of antibiotic resistance: Whether the drug-resistant organisms that emerge on farms as a result of antibiotic use stay on farms, or pose a risk to humans who have no connection to agriculture. That drug resistance emerges under any selective pressure is basic biology: Resistance is […]
This afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration posted without fanfare a report that many people have been waiting a long time for: Its first-ever estimate of the amount of antibiotics sold for use in food animals in the United States. And the number is: almost 29 million pounds in 2009. That’s a lot. Is it […]