Journalist and Author
Last week, the Senate committee charged with overseeing agricultural antibiotic use took up reauthorization of the regulation that delivers data on ag drugs, without allowing any testimony about the negative, unintended consequences of mis-using and overusing those drugs. Now, other members of Congress and various advocacy groups are trying to undo the damage. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
A district court in Georgia has unsealed a 76-count, 52-page indictment of former officials of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), charging them with fraud and conspiracy for knowingly distributing peanut products contaminated with Salmonella. More than 700 people were sickened by the peanuts; nine died. Wired Science blogger Maryn Mckenna has the details.
About a year ago, I told you about an indie effort to put together a superbug documentary called Resistance. The filmmakers, Ernie Park and Michael Graziano (who made the excellent documentary Lunch Line about school lunch programs), have been traveling around the world since then, meeting victims of antibiotic resistance and talking to health care […]
A new study finds a diverse and deep reservoir of drug resistance genes in samples from Chinese pig farms. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna explains why this finding is a cause for alarm.
A few days ago, the Food and Drug Administration released two important documents related to antibiotic use in livestock raising, and what the results of that antibiotic use are. The news is not good. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Dropping out of scary diseases and scary food for a moment, and into the (more) personal: This past weekend I spoke at Science Online, a fantastic conference in the Triangle area of North Carolina that brings together the different tribes of science communication — journalists, bloggers, scientists, public information officers, museum curators, videographers and audio […]
Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health. Why isn’t this being addressed? Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna considers the problem.
The first report from a completed randomized trial of fecal transplants finds that the treatment worked much better than powerful antibiotics that are usually given for gut infections — so much better, in fact, that the trial was ended early, because the monitoring board supervising the trial’s execution could not ethically justify withholding the transplants from more patients. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna has the straight poop.
Millions of pre-made burgers sold by supermarkets in the United Kingdom and Ireland have been taken off the market after the meat they contain was found to contain DNA from both horses and pigs. Could the horsemeat have originated in North America? Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna considers the possibility.
In a long debate that featured some stinging language, the British Parliament examined the use of antibiotics in agriculture for the first time in more than a decade. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna has the highlights.
Since the early 2000s, there have simultaneously been signs that drug-resistant gonorrhea is spreading from the Pacific Rim — Japan and Hawaii — to North America, Europe and the rest of the world. Now, a report from researchers in Canada suggests that standard gonorrhea treatment is not working in some patients there.
On New Year’s Day, seven polio vaccinators — six female health workers and a male doctor — were ambushed and shot to death in Pakistan. The violence there is a response to an admitted-to ruse by the CIA. Now, the deans of 12 public-health schools in the United States have sent an open appeal to President Obama excoriating the CIA attempt and asking that it never happen again.
Happy New Year, constant readers. For the second year in a row, here’s my list of which of my posts (91 in 2012!) most moved you to react. Last year (find that list here), I counted down based on which posts provoked the most comments. This year, Wired installed a tweet-counter — which registers only […]
The chicken nugget appears to have been invented — or at least, originally proposed — by a Cornell professor 17 years before McDonald’s had essentially the same idea.
Following up on last week’s post about the advance of dengue: I’ve been keeping track of new news regarding other diseases transmitted by insects and arthropods, but haven’t had a chance to write them up. So here’s an end-of-year round-up. It’s not cheery (are my posts ever cheery?), but maybe it will prompt some New […]
This paper almost slipped by me. It was published quietly a few weeks ago, and it’s a little eyebrow-raising. From EuroSurveillance, the open-access peer-reviewed bulletin of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (Europe’s CDC): The ST398 strain of MRSA, better known as “livestock-associated MRSA” or just “pig MRSA,” has been found for the first […]
This month, Slate has been running an intermittent series on pandemics under the guidance of new science editor Laura Helmuth. The latest entry in the series is one that I wrote (my first time writing for Slate, which is exciting). It’s about the under-appreciated threat to the United States of a disease that we barely […]
From a nasty foodborne illness sprang a family’s desire to learn more about food safety and the origins of what we eat. Now, the family is producing a film called “Food Patriots.” Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna tells their story.
Six people working as polio vaccinators were murdered in three separate coordinated attacks in Pakistan. While no one has yet claimed responsibility, it is widely assumed that the attackers have ties to the Taliban, which has opposed the polio-vaccination campaign as a Western plot and accused vaccinators of working as spies for the CIA.
The FDA is forgoing opportunities to compel companies to disclose data regarding the use of antibiotics in agriculture — data that some say is in the public’s interest to know. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna describes the situation.