Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Livestock MRSA Found For First Time In UK Milk

By Leave a Comment

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 time in milk in England. (And therefore probably in cows, or at least on farms.)

Apparently there has been an ongoing study looking for any evidence of MRSA in UK cows, possibly because of this news from last year (of which more in a minute). Between last January and July, the program tested 1,500 samples of milk from farms’ bulk tanks — that’s the cooler in which milk from a number of cows is collected until it can be picked up by a truck for processing — and found seven of the samples were contaminated by MRSA. All seven isolates were MRSA ST398, the livestock-associated strain. Three came from one farm, so five farms had MRSA in their tanks.  According to the paper, this is the first discovery of ST398 in the UK other than one finding in horses in 2009.

[Read more…]

The FDA Is Holding Back Data on Farm Antibiotics Use — And Plans to Keep Doing So

By Leave a Comment

Tomorrow morning, the US Food and Drug Administration will consider whether to accept reauthorization of legislation that allows us to know a few details about how many antibiotics are sold each year for agricultural use.

The agency probably will accept the reauthorization, and you would think that would be a good thing. But the untold story of the legislation — known as ADUFA for the Animal Drug User Fee Act — is that the FDA is forgoing opportunities to compel companies to disclose data that it would be in the public’s interest to know.

[Read more…]

Human Health, Hog Production and Environmental Harm

By Leave a Comment

I’ve been offline not just for deadlines (as usual), but also because I was preparing for the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers; I am a member and was a presenter on a couple of panels. The NASW meeting is twinned every year with a second meeting hosted by the nonprofit Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; NASW sessions are peer-to-peer journalism learning, whereas CASW ones feature academic researchers talking about their newest work.

This year’s meetings (collectively called SciWri12, or #SciWri12 if you want to find them on Twitter) were held in Raleigh, NC, and one of the most striking talks there was a report from epidemiologist Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill about his decade-long work investigating the local health effects of very large swine farms. (I’ve written about Wing’s work before.)

The newest news is a paper that he and his team published just as his talk commenced, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which finds an association between air pollution and odor in the near vicinity of swine farms, and hikes in blood pressure in local residents. When you put the pieces together — most hog c0nfinement operations are in poor, non-white areas; cardiovascular disease is endemic in African Americans;  North Carolina lies within the worst US area for cardiovascular disease, known as the “Stroke Belt” — you can see that anything that makes blood pressure chronically worse is bad news for public health.

[Read more…]

CDC: First Death From "State Fair Flu"

By Leave a Comment

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 that the victim was a 61-year-old woman from “central Ohio’s Madison County [who] died this week… after having contact with hogs at the Ross County Fair.” In a statement, the Ohio Department of Health says that she was one of 102 cases so far in the state this year. In total, the CDC says, there have been 289 cases so far this year (with Indiana leading, at 138 cases); in 2011, there were 12. Fifteen people have been hospitalized.

[Read more…]

News Round-Up: Sausage, Soil, Skeeters, Camping, China, Chimps And Other Hazards

By Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

News Round-Up: Meat, Superbugs, Denmark And Big Food

By Leave a Comment

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 summer stuff lined up — here’s a quick recap of things worth noticing:

[Read more…]

People Want to Eat Meat Raised Without Excessive Antibiotics. Wouldn't You?

By Leave a Comment

This news is going to be everywhere today, but it’s solidly in the topics I care about (and you readers care about — at least I think you do), so I’m going to cover it regardless.

The magazine Consumer Reports is publishing a report and poll on US consumers’ attitudes toward the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. From everyone’s reactions when I write about this, I thought people cared about this issue, but the numbers are a little surprising even to me: 86 percent of shoppers in a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults said they wanted meat raised without antibiotics to be available in their local supermarkets. [Read more…]

Beyond Factory Farming: Creating An Appetite For Pastured Poultry

By Leave a Comment

I get this a lot: “I understand that the things you write about are important — but they’re so depressing. Couldn’t you write some, you know, good news, for a change?”

So here you go: a solutions post for once, instead of another problem. (But I can’t promise to make a habit of it.)

[Read more…]

What Industrial Farming Has to Do With Devastated Seas

By Leave a Comment

I spent the end of last week at the latest iteration of the Sustainable Foods Institute, an intense two days of discussion that the Monterey Bay Aquarium (home of Seafood Watch, the guide to sustainable seafood choices) puts on every year to bring together journalists, advocates and chefs. The Institute takes place within Cooking for Solutions, an overlapping food and wine conference dedicated to the proposition that sustainability and care for the planet are inseparable from deliciousness.

This is not as universal an idea as you might think. As the conference was opening, the New York Times ran a joint interview with the globally influential chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz in which they explicitly rejected ecological concerns over where or from whom they source the food they serve. Keller: “Is global food policy truly our responsibility? … I don’t think so.” Aduriz: “To align yourself entirely with … sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.” (In a great response piece, Grist food editor Twilight Greenaway explains why their thinking is so short-sighted.)

But “global food policy” ought to be the concern of anyone who raises, grows, catches, fishes, forages, sells or even just eats food — because, as University of Minnesota academic Jonathan Foley said in a devastating talk halfway through the two days: “We’re running out of everything. We’re running out of planet.”

[Read more…]

Mothers, Farmers and Chefs Against Antibiotic Misuse

By Leave a Comment

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may remember Everly Macario and her son Simon Sparrow: I told their story in my 2010 book Superbug and blogged about them in 2011. Everly is a public health researcher in Chicago and the sister and daughter of physicians. Yet despite all her own knowledge, and all the knowledge resident in her family, she was unable to protect 17-month-old Simon from the MRSA infection that killed him in 24 hours in 2004.

Simon, as I wrote about him last year, was:

[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.”

She did, and then she called her husband, who reversed course and began tearing back to the city. At the hospital, Simon failed rapidly: His heart raced, his blood pressure crashed, his lungs filled with fluid. His skin darkened with pinpoint hemorrhages. He died the following morning.

Simon Sparrow. Photo: Courtesy Everly Macario

[Read more…]