Journalist and Author
In the summer of 2009, two men from northwest Missouri showed up at Heartland Regional Medical Center seriously sick. They had high fevers, fatigue, aches, diarrhea and disordered blood counts. But they had none of the known illnesses that matched those symptoms. The two men had one thing in common, though: About a week before being hospitalized, each remembered, he had been bitten by a tick. From that memory has come an unnerving discovery: a heretofore unknown tick-borne illness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today reported the first death from influenza A H3N2 variant (H3N2v), the swine flu strain that has been crossing intermittently from pigs to humans since last year. The victim was an “older adult with multiple underlying health conditions,” according to the CDC, and the Associated Press fills in […]
This has been my week: Oh, wow: I should write about that. No, wait — that. Damn, new news; I’ll blog this paper instead. Except, hold on — this one is great too… So to solve my indecision before the week ends, here you go: Most of this week’s most interesting news, in round-up form.
The history of antibiotics’ discovery is riddled with dark secrets. Superbug blogger and author Maryn McKenna interviews Peter Pringle, author of the new book “Experiment Eleven,” about the truth behind the advent of these wonder drugs.
News has erupted over an outbreak of drug-resistant disease at an NIH-funded hospital. But Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna explains the real news is that this scene plays over and over again, practically every day.
I’ve been away on assignment, and while I was gone, wow: Suddenly a ton of public important public health news. While I catch up, a quick placeholder, on the importance of cities to the spread of disease. Recently I was in Dublin, where I gave a talk at the Science Gallery as part of their […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its latest mapping of obesity in the United States, based on data gathered by a CDC project known as BRFSS for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. The BRFSS is a massive, continuous telephone survey of adults in U.S. states and territories, and every year it churns out high-quality information on a vast array of public health issues: smoking, heart disease, arthritis, asthma, immunization coverage, cancers, diet…. For anyone interested in health data, it’s a huge resource.
I started my journalism career as a projects reporter, working on the kind of investigations that involve sitting in windowless rooms for weeks digging through stacks of old documents. One of the investigations I worked on was the ugly history of the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center outside Cincinnati, a 1,000-acre site near the Indiana […]
Exactly 6 months after warning that gonorrhea was becoming untreatable by two drugs, the Centers for Disease Control has taken one of those drugs off the table, leaving just one antibiotic available to treat the disease. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Charles Duhigg’s new book The Power of Habit helped Superbug blogger and author Maryn McKenna understand both her own bad habits and those in medicine, agriculture and elsewhere. Get some insight into our loopy tendencies in McKenna’s chat with Duhigg.
A new study warns that cases of highly drug-resistant gonorrhea are increasing in Europe — and getting even more drug-resistant. Superbug blogger and author Maryn McKenna reports.
Health authorities now think the extraordinary ongoing epidemic of whooping cough — the worst in more than 50 years — may be due in part to unexpected poor performance by the vaccine meant to prevent the disease.
A quick Sunday note: At 5 p.m. today, Eastern time, something extraordinary will happen in Washington, D.C. It won’t look like much — just the opening of a big conference in a big convention center — but when the 19th International AIDS Conference begins its opening ceremonies, it will mark the first time in 22 […]
By treating animals only as vectors for disease, we could be missing out on crucial understanding of our own health. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna chats with an author of the new book “Zoobiquity.”
People don’t have to believe in the “big idea” of a crisis before they are willing to take action to defuse it. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna asks author Maggie Koerth-Baker some questions about her new book, Before the Lights Go Out.
Over the past decade, researchers have uncovered links between the use of antibiotics in chicken production and rising resistance in one of the most common bacterial infections in the world. Superbug author and blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
I have a small private belief — for which, despite being a science writer, I can produce no data — that much of the complex difficulty of the American food system would vanish if people knew how to cook. When I say “cook,” I don’t mean mimicking “Top Chef” theatrics, or reproducing the transglutaminase excesses […]
Everyone knows to shield their eyes from sparklers and bottle rockets on the 4th of July, but another less obvious thing to beware of is the wire brush most of us use to clean our backyard grills.
I was off-line for a week with family issues, and while I was gone, news broke out. (It senses your absence, news does. This is the real reason why coups and major foodborne outbreaks happen in August.) So while I dive into the bigger stories that seem to be happening — and get some fun […]
(Update: Mid-afternoon June 22, US time, the video was “made private by uploader” on YouTube, making both video and many derisive comments by women inaccessible. I’ve put a screengrab from it above. Second update: Thankfully the original was mirrored. Embed restored below.) (Update, June 25: The almost-universal outrage over the video had the desired effect. […]