Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Government Health Agency Agrees Mega-Farms Are A Health Risk (In The UK)

November 4, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s very odd sometimes watching how the same issues play out in different parts of the world. The French environment ministry confidently ascribes the growth of seaweed choking its beaches to farm runoff. The European Parliament denounces the establishment of very large-scale “meat factories.” China (China!) enacts a ban on growth-promoting uses of antibiotics in agriculture.

Here in the United States, on the other hand, the government gropes unsuccessfully for a way to put controls on confinement agriculture, despite evidence of its environmental harm, while at the same time those farms grow by an estimated 4,600 hogs and 5,800 broiler chickens per day.

For more of that difference between Europe and the US, look this week to England, where the Health Protection Agency has just rejected the zoning application for a hog farm that was small by US standards, with a plan for only 2,500 sows producing about 20,000 piglets. The HPA said:

… those living up to 150 meters downwind of an intensive swine farming installation could be at risk of adverse human health effects associated with exposure to multi-drug resistant organisms. (this .pdf, p.30 of 44)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, China, england, Europe, food, food policy, france, pigs, Resistance, Science Blogs

Big Move: Chicago Schools To Buy Antibiotic-Free Chicken

November 1, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Big news today on several fronts: against the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and for healthier food for school children. The Chicago Public Schools announced that its main food-service company, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, will begin buying and serving chicken drumsticks from birds raised in the local area without antibiotics. The deal will bring 1.2 million pounds of chicken to 473 schools per year, and represents about 25 percent of all the chicken that Chartwells-Thompson serves in the school system.

The new move was announced in a media telephone briefing that was hosted by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming and included representatives from Chartswell-Thompson; the nonprofit organizations School Foods Focus and the Healthy Schools Campaign; Whole Foods Market, which is making it affordable to transport the birds; and Miller Amish Country Poultry, the supplier.

This is an important deal for several different reasons: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, Chicago, food, food policy, nutrition, Resistance, schools, Science Blogs

Antibiotic Prescribing to Kids — Down, But Still Too Much

September 1, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the CDC’s weekly bulletin today, there’s a report: 58 percent of the antibiotic prescriptions given to kids and pre-teens during medical office visits are for conditions for which antibiotics are not necessary.

And that’s an improvement.

It’s a sign of how difficult it has become to change the trend of over-use of antibiotics in human medicine, which — along with overuse in agriculture — is one of the main drivers of the emergence of antibiotic resistance worldwide.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, diagnostics, Resistance, Science Blogs

Drug Resistance in Food — Coming From Aquaculture?

August 12, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the midst of the giant Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak last week — now up to 107 cases in 31 states, and triggering a recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey — it was easy to miss that a second and even more troubling strain of resistant Salmonella is on the move. As I wrote last week, that strain is called Salmonella Kentucky ST198, it is much more drug-resistant than the U.S. Heidelberg outbreak, and it has been spreading since 2002 from Egypt and north Africa through Europe, and has now been identified in the United States. Its primary vector appears to be chicken meat.

There is an interesting and troubling aspect to the spreading Kentucky strain that there wasn’t time to talk about last week, in the midst of the Heidelberg news. It’s this: The authors suspect that this enhanced resistance — to Cipro, and thus the class called fluoroquinolones that are very important in treating Salmonella — may have come into African chickens via drug use in aquaculture.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs

Resistant Salmonella: Deadly Yet Somehow Not Illegal

August 5, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As the scale of the nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg started to sink in Thursday — along with the stunningly large recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey, much of it probably already eaten — there were a number of moments that made a careful listener need to stop and just think.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, E. coli, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs

Highly Resistant Salmonella: Poultry, Antibiotics, Borders, Risk

August 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’re a strain of Salmonella, it’s a very good week. If you’re a human, not so much.

There are two stories occurring simultaneously that underline the rising danger of drug-resistant organisms in the food supply, and the porousness of networks for detecting the dangerous bugs in time.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs

Are Counterfeit Drugs Driving Antibiotic Resistance?

August 1, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A British couple have been convicted and jailed for running a black market in veterinary drugs that was so large, it earned more money than legal sales of the same drugs — 6 million pounds (almost $10 million) just in the United Kingdom where the case was brought.

(In a detail that seems made for the beleaguered UK tabloids, the wife of the couple moonlighted as a Princess Diana lookalike.)

The business — lucrative enough to pay for an 11-bedroom farmhouse in France — was based on counterfeit and falsely labeled drugs purchased primarily in India, imported covertly, and resold through a network of companies to farmers, stables and kennels, and veterinary practices. The drugs offered included anti-inflammatories, pain medications, sedatives and antibiotics. Which means that the case raises an important questions: How much counterfeit and covertly distributed drugs are contributing to the international epidemic of antibiotic resistance — in this case, not just in human medicine, but in veterinary medicine as well.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, counterfeit, Resistance, Science Blogs

Attack of the Deadly Slime: Farm Effluent Ruins French Beaches

July 26, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Vacationers in northwest France are being warned to stay away from beaches, which are growing a bumper crop of a seaweed that releases a potentially toxic gas. The culprit: Up-stream releases of manure from intensive farming that overload the near-shore waters with nitrates.

The seaweed (sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca) must be removed within 48 hours of washing ashore — because as it rots, it releases so much hydrogen sulfide that swimmers and strollers are endangered. The French ministry for health and the environment has warned visitors to avoid areas with overgrowth, and told workers scooping up the seaweed that they must wear monitors to alert them they have entered especially toxic pockets and must clear out within minutes.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, france, Science Blogs

WCSJ: Plant Diseases, Farmer Suicides And The Peril of A Hungry Future

July 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Here’s my second report from the World Conference of Science Journalists — and if you thought the first one on diabetes in China was depressing, just wait for this one.

Since I wrote SUPERBUG the book and started this blog, I’ve been fascinated by stresses and problems in food production. (For evidence, see any of this long archive.) This conference in Qatar, which drew 726 journalists, most from the global south, was a chance to hear from people  immersed in food issues in places we in the north don’t know enough about. So for my panel on agriculture and food security, I invited people whom I wanted to learn from.

And wow, did I.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Africa, agriculture, drought, food, food policy, india, Science Blogs

More MRSA, in milk: A new strain in cows and humans

June 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 Denmark have announced they have found a never-before recorded variant of MRSA in cow’s milk in England that has already caused human infections in England, Scotland and Denmark, and researchers in Ireland have simultaneously announced that they have found the same strain in hospitalized patients there as well.

Here’s how this unfolded:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, milk, MRSA, Science Blogs, ST398

MRSA in meat: How much? Which? And more bad news.

May 31, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

(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 Society for Microbiology (ASM). This is the conference at which, several years ago, Tara Smith’s team at the University of Iowa first announced they had found MRSA ST398 in pigs in the United States, so it always bears watching for new MRSA news, and this year it didn’t disappoint.

First: I’ve complained persistently because the federal system that monitors antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food, NARMS (National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System) doesn’t include MRSA among the pathogens that it tracks. It is possible that might be changing — because at ASM, a team from the Food and Drug Administration reported the results of a pilot study that looked for MRSA in retail meat in the US and found it.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, MRSA, Science Blogs, ST398

Growth Promoters: If You Can't Convince Them, Sue Them

May 25, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 has been trying to restrict subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock since the 1970s because of the practice’s clear contribution to the development of antibiotic resistance, and had always been defeated. At the same time, it was far from bold: The proposal was made in a draft document that would be made final at some unspecified future date, and that when it became final would have behind it no force of regulation or law. (Here’s my long discussion from last year of the context and history of FDA’s move.)

And there things rested, while the FDA’s docket reportedly filled up with thousands of comments from both sides of the issue. The document — formally, Draft Guidance #209, Judicious Use of Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals — is scheduled to be finalized sometime before the end of this year. But in its draft form, it excited abundant opposition, and the administration official who seemed to be leading the charge on it, memorably suggesting, “We have the regulatory mechanisms and the industry knows that,” has left the FDA for a state-government job.

Clearly, things aren’t moving very fast. So today, a coalition of nonprofit groups attempted to get the issue jump-started: They sued.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, growth promoters, Resistance, Science Blogs

Farm Antibiotics: 'Pig Staph' in a Daycare Worker

May 9, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 because it had an unusual resistance factor — to tetracycline, a drug that it should not have been resistant to, because the Netherlands had such low rates of MRSA that tetracycline wasn’t being used against the bacterium there.

Pursuing the source of the strain, researchers at Radboud University found it in the toddler’s parents and sister, and in the family’s friends. Not knowing where else to look, they asked what the parents and their friends did for a living; discovered they were all pig farmers; and went to their farms, and checked the pigs, and found it being carried by them, too. Suddenly, that strange resistance pattern made sense: The Netherlands uses more antibiotics in pig agriculture than any other country in the European Union, and the drug that it uses the most is tetracycline. Clearly, the aberrant strain — known as MRSA ST398 for its performance on a particular identifying test — at some point had wandered into pigs, become resistant to the drugs being given to the pigs, and then crossed back to humans, carrying that new resistance factor as it went.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, MRSA, Resistance, Science Blogs, ST398

Turning grief into action: Moms and antibiotic misuse

May 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 shabby suite of offices, carved out of University of Chicago’s long-replaced children’s hospital. I sat in a green-tinged conference room piled with stacks of articles while Everly Macario — a Harvard-trained ScD in public health, the daughter and sister of physicians — described how MRSA killed her toddler son Simon in less than 24 hours.

“We have no idea where he got it,” she told me. “We have no idea why he was susceptible.”

Simon Sparrow was 17 months old in April 2004, a big, sturdy child with no health problems except a touch of asthma. The day before he died, he woke up feverish and disoriented, startling his parents with a cry unlike anything they had heard from him before. It was a busy morning — his older sister had a stomach virus — but they got him to the pediatric ER, got him checked, and brought him home when doctors found nothing unusual going on.

A few hours later, Everly was working at home, watching both kids, and Simon’s breathing changed. Her husband James, a history professor, had driven a few hours away to give a speech. She called a friend who is a pediatrician, held the phone up to Simon’s nose and mouth so she could hear, and then got back on the line.

“Hang up,” her friend said. “Call 911.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, food, food policy, MRSA, Science Blogs

The biggest foodborne-disease threat may not be addressed by the new food-safety law

April 28, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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: the FDA, USDA and CDC. The FDA has responsibility for most of the food supply, including seafood, produce, processed food and fresh eggs. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulates fresh meat and poultry and egg products. The CDC surveys the illnesses that result from any of them, estimating most recently that one in six US residents, or about 48 million people, get sick each year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.

But most of those illnesses are never investigated, because a substantial portion of them occur individually or in small clusters, not in major outbreaks. Many of them have long-term consequences that are never recorded by any federal counting mechanism. And there’s currently no surveillance system that links pathogens and food — which means there’s no way to target which foods, or food-raising practices, pose the greatest risks.

The new food-safety bill, signed in January, addresses at least some of those barriers, by requiring a risk-based approach to foodborne illness — meaning, you look at what is causing the greatest problem, and aim your efforts and funding in that direction. But the bill — which certain Congressmen have threatened to starve of funding — covers primarily the FDA. And a new analysis suggests that’s not where the greatest problems lie. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, CDC, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, FSIS, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs, USDA

Multi-Drug Resistant Staph in 1 in 4 Meat Samples

April 15, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 Clinical Infectious Diseases helps answer both those questions. (I received an advance copy under embargo; I’ll put up the link when the journal posts it. here’s the link to the full-text pdf.)

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the United States contained multidrug resistant staph. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, food, food policy, Science Blogs, ST398

The Enemy Within: A new superbug, KPC/CRKP

March 28, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 Klebsiella (above, from the CDC) and E. coli.

Carbapenems are drugs of last resort for Gram-negatives, which include many of the bacteria that cause potentially deadly infections in debilitated ICU patients and frail elderly in nursing homes. Gram-negatives have been becoming ever-more resistant to antibiotics, but the carbapenems remained reliable drugs of last resort for even the most serious cases. Then, in 1996, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spotted the first signal that carbapenems were under threat: A single bacterial sample, found in a patient in a North Carolina hospital, that was resistant to the carbapenems and could only be treated by a few remaining drugs that were much less effective or so toxic that medicine had put them on the shelf years ago.

By 2000, that same resistance pattern surfaced in hospitals in Manhattan: first one, then another, then a third and fourth. Then it began to spread to cities where New Yorkers vacation, and then to countries where they travel. Now, more than a decade later, it has reached at least 37 states and at least a dozen countries around the world.

It is spreading much faster than drugs to combat it could be developed — if there were such drugs. One of the difficulties, indeed tragedies, of carbapenem resistance is that there are very few such drugs left — because, for reasons I’ve explored before, drug development in the United States has ground to a halt. For resistant Gram-negatives, there are almost no drugs left, and none on the immediate horizon. If that scares you, well, it should.

Here’s a quick snip from the article:

The end of the antibiotic miracle is not a new theme. For as long as there have been antibiotics, there has been antibiotic resistance: The first penicillin-resistant bacteria surfaced before penicillin was even released to the marketplace in the 1940s. And for almost that long, doctors have raised the alarm over running out of drugs, sparked by the global spread of penicillin-resistant organisms in the 1950s and followed by methicillin resistance in the 1980s and vancomycin resistance in the 1990s.

This time, though, the prediction of post-antibiotic doom comes from a different part of the microbial world. The genes that confer carbapenem resistance have appeared over the past decade or so in a particularly challenging grouping of bacteria called gram-negatives.

Gram-negative bacteria are promiscuous: They facilely exchange bits of DNA, so that a resistance gene that arises in Klebsiella, for example, quickly migrates to E. coli, Acinetobacter and other gram-negative species. Gram-negative germs are also harder to dispatch with antibiotics because they have a double-layered membrane that even powerful drugs struggle to penetrate, and possess certain internal cellular defenses as well. In addition, fewer options exist for treating them. Pharmaceutical firms are making few new antibiotics of any type these days. For the protean, stubborn gram-negatives, they have no new compounds in the pipeline at all.

Carbapenem resistance has already brought hospital-acquired infections to the brink of untreatable. The imagined future that keeps health authorities awake at night is the undetected dissemination of carbapenem resistance genes into organisms that cause everyday maladies—such as E. coli, which is responsible for most of the millions of urinary tract infections in the U.S. every year.

Carbapenem resistance in Klebsiella — which is sometimes called KPC or CRKP for short — got a spike of attention last week just as my piece hit the web. Coincidentally, the article posted just as the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released results of a survey showing 356 cases just between June and December 2010 just in LA County medical facilities.

This SciAm piece is the first that we know of to tell the whole tangled, troubling story. I hope you’ll take a look.

And while you’re there, please read SciAm’s brave and cogent editorial against antibiotic overuse in industrial-scale agriculture. It’s marvelous.

CDC Public Health Image Library

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, CDC, CRKP, KPC, Resistance, SciAm, Science Blogs

China pig crisis: Drug residues in pork

March 26, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 being tested.

The story has been unfolding for the past week without much notice from Western media, but it has been heavily covered in China, even in English-language media there.

Clenbuterol, which lingers in muscle tissue for months and concentrates in some organs, is hazardous to humans because of its stimulant properties: It revs up the heart and gives you the shakes, and can be especially dangerous for pregnant women. (Here’s the data sheet from the Food Safety and Inspection Service.) If it sounds familiar, that’s because its stimulant qualities also make it a performance enhancer — and thus a banned drug for elite athletes, including a listing on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Prohibited List. Tour de France winner Alberto Contador was temporarily banned from cycling this year after a positive clenbuterol test, and US Olympic swimmer Jessica Hardy was found positive for the drug in 2008 (a finding she blamed on an allegedly tainted supplement). Clenbuterol’s a common subject on body-building forums (here’s one example) for its perceived ability to build lean muscle while diminishing fat.

And that may have been the motivation in China: putting lean weight, inexpensively, on pigs.

Here’s what’s known:

On March 17, the Chinese TV network CCTV reported that 19 pigs at a slaughterhouse in Henan province, part of a lot of 689, had tested positive for clenbuterol in their urine. About 20 people — farmers, middlemen, quarantine inspectors and a buyer for the processing company, Jiyuan Shuanghui Food Co., Ltd. — were arrested.

On March 18, Xinhua News reported that the number of positive tests had grown to 52 pigs out of 1,512, on nine farms tested, and the number of people in police custody had grown to 30. Plus, the scandal had spread to a second province, Jiangsu, after 20 randomly picked pigs out of 264 from Henan tested positive at a slaughterhouse in Nanjing. Concern over the brewing scandal drew the central government’s Ministry of Commerce into the issue; the agency urged the company where the tainted pork was first found — which happens to be a subsidiary of China’s largest meat processor — to suspend production and start an internal investigation.

On March 19, the central government convened an emergency meeting of pig farmers, meat processors and food retailers, and two days later ordered provincial authorities to start a crackdown that extends to checking backyard pigs.

And on March 25, the government released its annual food safety plan and put special emphasis on banning clenbuterol and tracking down illegal users.

Notably, the more-free parts of the Chinese media are pushing the government to do more. China Daily editorialized on Thursday:

Why can’t quarantine workers go to pig farms in a random way to check the pigs? Why do they have to wait for the pig urine sent by pig raisers? Why aren’t pigs randomly checked immediately before they are butchered? What is both funny and sad is the fact that a local bureau of animal husbandry in central China’s Henan Province checked a problematic pig farm and 98.8 percent of the pigs tested were passed safe on March 15. But an investigation by reporters after the check found that the farm still feeds pigs clenbuterol, which was banned nine years ago.

The revelation that pigs are being fed growth hormones that are considered harmful to humans so the animals develop more muscle and less fat has shaken consumers’ confidence in pork, just as the melamine scandal did with milk. Anyone involved, whether pig raisers or quarantine checkers, must be brought to justice…

The general public wants to be told how problematic pigs can pass a series of tests before they are butchered and how the meat containing harmful substances can go through a series of tests and still end up in the mouths of consumers.They also want to know whether the culprits, including pig raisers who have fed pigs harmful chemicals and those who took money to turn a blind eye to the problematic pigs and meat will get the punishments they deserve.

This isn’t the first time clenbuterol has been found in pork in China. In 2009, 70 people in Guangdong province were hospitalized for stimulant poisoning after eating organ meats from contaminated pigs; in 2006, more than 300 people in Shanghai were sickened. In January, two months before this scandal surfaced, the AP’s Alexa Olesen wrote a prescient long takeout on the complexity of controlling clenbuterol abuse, especially in rural areas.

Here’s a question: Activism for safe food in the United States was arguably ignited by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel that served as an expose of the contamination and filthy conditions he witnessed working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. There was such a public outcry at his revelations that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the first US food-safety legislation, was written and passed in the same year the book came out. The Jungle was so influential that, 105 years later, it is still in print.

I wonder: Who will write a Jungle for China? And given the repression that seems to be practiced against whistleblowers there, if anyone did, would it see print?

Flickr/JulianPTan/CC

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, China, food, food policy, food safety, Science Blogs

Diseases and borders: Potatoes and St. Patrick's Day

March 17, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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 know as Peru broke Spain’s last hold on the New World. The nascent Republic needed trade relationships, and quickly: It had borrowed heavily from banks in Europe to finance its 3-year war of independence. But after 300 years of colonization, all it had to offer, bluntly, was crap.

No, really, crap. Bat and seabird crap, otherwise known as guano. In the centuries before the establishment of the chemical industry, guano was a precious commodity, a potent natural fertilizer packed with nitrate and phosphates. There were enormous deposits of guano on the Andean coast and offshore islands; they provided the currency that Peru’s new government leveraged into a web of trade relationships with England, the United States, and France. Guano quickly became Peru’s leading export and the basis of its entire economy. In 1841, the government nationalized the guano deposits, selling the stuff to its European and American partners in hundreds of shiploads — tens of thousands of tons — per year. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, food, food policy, ireland, personal, Science Blogs

See you in the funny pages (with a serious message)

March 9, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, comics, food, food policy, personal, Science Blogs

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