Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Speaking and Teaching
  • Audio & Video
    • Audio
    • Video
  • Journalism
    • Articles
    • Past Newspaper Work
  • Books
    • Big Chicken
    • SuperBug
    • Beating Back the Devil
  • Bio
  • Home

Get Your Shots, Wash Your Hands, Thanks, and Goodbye

March 27, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

icenine-exit

IceNine (CC), on Flickr

A little less than 5 years ago, editor Betsy Mason of WIRED Science called to ask whether I’d be interested in joining a new thing. WIRED was thinking about starting a science blog platform; she wondered whether I’d want to be one of the bloggers.

I did very much want: WIRED is both a great magazine, with inspiring storytelling and innovative design, and a brand with international reach. I was a bit perplexed why they would want me — scary diseases didn’t seem like a core interest for WIRED readers — but Betsy (now one of the authors of WIRED’s Map Lab blog) was confident the audience was there.

She was right. Superbug debuted Sept. 14, 2010 with a report on the “Indian superbug,” the antibiotic resistance factor NDM that was then just starting to move across the world. My second post explored “livestock MRSA,” the bacterium that originates in antibiotic overuse in agriculture, and the third looked at the shivery subject of a rare and deadly parasite transmitted by organ transplants. Those three posts pretty much defined Superbug’s turf: public health, global health, and food policy, with a sprinkle of dread. Readers responded with fascination and good will, then and to the more than 300 posts afterward.

Of which, as you’ve probably guessed, this is the last. Superbug has had a fantastic run, but there was only one other place I wanted to work, and I’m headed there. Next week, I’ll be joining National Geographic’s Phenomena under a new blog name.

(Worth saying: This move is coincident with Wired.com’s redesign, but is not at all related. Phenomena happened to have a rare opening.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, Ebola, food policy, Lyme, Never Seconds, polio, Resistance, TB

Your McNuggets: Soon Without a Side of Antibiotics

March 4, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Fast-food giant McDonald’s announced today that it will cease buying chicken raised with the routine use of most antibiotics, a move that seems certain to reframe the contentious debate about agriculture’s use of the increasingly precious drugs. The company set a deadline of two years to make chicken in its 14,000 US locations substantially antibiotic-free.

The announcement instantly makes McDonald’s the largest company by far to use its buying power to change how livestock are raised. Its 25 million US customers a day dwarf those at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which pioneered fast food using antibiotic-free meat, and also at Chick-fil-A, which announced a year ago that it would move to antibiotic-free chicken in five years.

McDonald’s new policy doesn’t solve the farm-antibiotics problem. The company is making the move only for chicken, not for beef or pork (though chicken is already the meat Americans eat the most). And the policy has important caveats. But since McDonald’s is the largest food-service buyer of chicken in America, this can’t help but affect other restaurants, and production of other meats.

In a phone interview, Marion Gross, senior vice president of McDonald’s North America Supply Chain, said the company made the move because customers have been asking for it. “This about meaningful action that is important to our customers,” she said. “We’re happy to be able to achieve this. This is not something new; we had our first antibiotic policy in place back in 2003, so it’s the evolution of a journey we have been on for some time.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, mcdonalds, Resistance

Resistance: The Movie That Will Make You Care About Antibiotic Misuse

February 24, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A few years ago I happened to get introduced to a pair of filmmakers, Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, who were starting to explore the topic of antibiotic resistance. They had the same questions about resistance that I obsess over, and the same shock about how enormous the problem is: according to a recent estimate, 700,000 deaths every year, likely to rise into the millions if nothing is done.

They recognized their disbelief as the creative spark for a project, and three years later, have brought out Resistance, a documentary now available on iTunes. LV Anderson just said about it, in Slate:

Regardless of your preexisting interest in public health or food politics, once you learn a little about antibiotic abuse, you won’t be able to stop caring about it. Without antibiotics, many of the medical treatments that we take for granted would be impossible, and the speed and carelessness with which we squander these important drugs — on people who don’t need them and on livestock that really don’t need them — is downright infuriating…  In talking-head interviews with well-chosen, highly articulate experts, Resistance explains the fundamental reason the incorrect use of antibiotics is so dangerous: Every time we use antibiotics, we give bacteria another chance to develop resistance to it.

I think Resistance is a fantastic exploration of the problem, but I am likely to be biased, because I am in it. But I realized as I watched it that there was a lot about the documentary that I didn’t know: how it came to be, why the stories within it were chosen, and whether making it changed the filmmakers’ life.

Here’s an edited chat with Michael Graziano about making the film.

Maryn McKenna: Your previous film, Lunch Line, was about school lunch and nutrition. Antibiotic resistance seems a long way from that. What got you interested?

Michael Graziano: I was hoping to get rich as quickly as possible. I calculated that if I spent three years making a film about science and public health the money would start pouring in.

Turns out my calculations were wrong.

[Read more…]

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

The Poultry Industry Responds to an Activist Farmer

February 23, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Farmer Craig Watts.

Farmer Craig Watts. RANDALL HILL/Reuters/Corbis

Last week I broke the story that contract chicken farmer Craig Watts, who had let animal-welfare activists film in the barns where he raises poultry for Perdue Farms, filed for whistleblower protection against the company because he felt retaliated against. In his complaint — made to the Department of Labor under the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act — Watts said that the condition of the chicks Perdue delivered to him compelled him to raise “adulterated or misbranded food” for consumers, and that when he attempted to reveal this, the company harassed him with inspectors’ visits.

When I posted on Watts’ complaint, which has the form of a lawsuit though it is filed with a federal agency not a court, I said I’d update once I got reaction from the company or the industry. I’ve received their reactions now and, since it’s been a few days, it seems more fair to break them out in a separate post, rather than adding to last week’s.

Short version, with details below: Perdue and the National Chicken Council both say that Watts — who has not lost his contract with the company — is not being retaliated against, but needs guidance to do a better job raising the chickens he is sent.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry, whistleblower

A Factory Farmer Strikes Back at the Company He Farms For

February 19, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Farmer Craig Watts. original: video by Compassion in World Farming

Farmer Craig Watts. Screenshot: video by Compassion in World Farming

Back in December I wrote about a chicken farmer who took the extraordinary step of inviting animal-welfare activists into his barns to document the conditions under which his contract compels him to raise his birds. The farmer, Craig Watts of North Carolina, has raised chicken for Perdue Farms for two decades and has often been a top producer for them; he was not an outlier, but someone well within the corporate farming system. Yet it weighed on his conscience that even when he did his best to care for them, the birds seemed deformed and unwell. “The consumer’s being hoodwinked,” he said at the time.

The video he made with the group Compassion in World Farming has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. Watts continues to raise chickens for Perdue; the company did not yank his contract. But he claims he has been subjected to a campaign of retaliation from Perdue as a result, with very frequent visits from a variety of inspectors, and so he has taken a second extraordinary step. He has filed a federal complaint claiming whistleblower protection, alleging that he was forced to violate laws that protect consumers against “adulterated or misbranded” food.

Watts was not the first chicken contract farmer to speak out — Carole Morrison, a Maryland contract farmer, appeared in the documentary Food, Inc. and lost her livelihood as a result — but he’s almost certainly the first to strike back.

Watts is being represented by the Food Integrity Campaign, part of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which filed on his behalf this morning with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, within the US Department of Labor. The complaint and cover letter are on the nonprofit’s site. The cover letter sums up the issue (“Complainant” is Watts and “Respondent” is Perdue):

Complainant has observed an increase in the number of chicks placed on his farm carrying bacterial infections. As a result, Complainant believes that Respondent has not adequately controlled sanitation in its hatcheries to prevent birds from developing infections while at the hatchery, and is not culling sick birds from flocks at the hatchery with sufficient care to prevent the introduction and spread of diseases among the flocks placed on his farm. Additionally, Complainant believes that because Respondent crowds too many birds into each house, the birds do not have adequate room to move around freely, causing them trample each other to access water and food, which in turn leads to scratches and increased risk of infection. Moreover, Respondent prohibits Complainant from administering antibiotics and other medications to sick birds, and Respondent has refused to administer drugs to the birds when Complainant has sought help dealing with apparent outbreaks of disease among flocks placed on his farm.

Watts and his attorneys claim protection under the recent Food Safety Modernization Act, which added whistleblower “employee protection” provisions to the thicket of laws that govern food safety in the United States.

It’s notable that, in the complaint, Watts doesn’t ask for much: He doesn’t seek punitive damages, for instance, just attorneys’ fees and legal costs. Mostly what he asks is to continue to farm. After he went public,  the poultry industry responded that the conditions in the video were the result of his poor farming practices; Watts says the first inspectors’ visits were within hours of the video going live, and continued “almost daily” since then, 23 times in the past two months. According to him, he was put on a  “performance improvement plan,” and the complaint asks for that to be reversed, and for an end to any “retaliatory increased inspections.”

This is a lot of legalese, but the key facts are these: Most of the meat we eat in the US is raised in conditions that most consumers cannot see. This farmer felt those conditions were injurious to animals and bad for eaters. He opened the doors on his small corner of the industry in the hopes of changing it, and he wants to keep those doors open. Whistleblower protection might help him do that. I reached Watts quickly by phone, and he said: “I want there to be some avenue for farmers to be protected, so that they don’t have to be walking around on eggshells. Hopefully this is it.”

Because the complaint was just posted, Perdue has not yet commented, but I will ask them for comment and update this post when they do.

Here’s the original video in which Watts appeared:

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry, whistleblower

How to Fight Superbugs: Start Spending Money

February 5, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory.

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory. Center for Disease Control/AP


The government-chartered British project examining antibiotic resistance — which made such a splash in December with its prediction that untreatable resistance will kill 10 million people per year by 2050 — has produced its first set of recommendations for turning back the problem.

They come down to this: Start spending money.

The project — formally titled the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance — analyzes the funding spent directly on resistance research, and indirectly through training specialists and investing in innovation, and finds that the resources devoted by governments and the private sector are not up to the job. With the same bluntness that marked its first report, the project says: “There is a problem of chronic under-investment in both the financial and human capital needed to tackle antimicrobial resistance.”

[Read more…]

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

The White House 2016 Budget Includes Big Funding for Antibiotic Resistance

January 31, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

Next week, President Barack Obama will unveil his full budget request for the coming fiscal year. When he does, he’ll also reveal details of how his administration plans to fund the national strategy for combating antibiotic resistance that the White House released last autumn.

Here’s what we know so far, based on a fact sheet that the White House released earlier this week:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, budget, Resistance, White House

The Coming Cost of Superbugs: 10 Million Deaths Per Year

December 15, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory.

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory. Center for Disease Control/AP

If you weren’t taking antibiotic resistance seriously before, now would be a good time to start.

A project commissioned by the British government has released estimates of the near-future global toll of antibiotic resistance that are jaw-dropping in their seriousness and scale: 10 millions deaths per year, more than cancer, and at least $100 trillion in sacrificed gross national product.

[Read more…]

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

Hoping to Change the Industry, a Factory Farmer Opens His Barn Doors

December 4, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This post has been updated; read to the end.)

A few months ago, reporting on farm antibiotic use, I met a North Carolina farmer named Craig Watts. Craig lives in a small town near the South Carolina line where his forebears have been since the Carolinas were a British colony, and for more than 20 years, he has raised broiler chickens for Perdue Farms.

Watts went into chicken farming because, where he lives, there were not many alternatives. His parents and relatives had been row-crop farmers, but after the tobacco economy began to collapse, that looked like not a great way to make a living. Out of college, he began working as a field technician for an agricultural-chemicals company, but he disliked cubicle life and wanted to get back outside. When an advance man for Perdue came calling, showing spreadsheets of how lucrative chicken farming might be, he decided to give it a try.

It worked for him at first; he said that he was, intermittently, a top earner in the slaughterhouse complex that buys his chickens. But over the years, he chafed at the economic conditions the vertically integrated business imposed on farmers, who always seemed to get the raw end of the deal, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable with what intensive farming did to the chickens themselves. He began speaking out: first writing op-eds, then testifying at a government hearing exploring unfair contract conditions, and then talking to advocates and journalists.

And now he has taken his boldest step yet — really an extraordinary one, given the closed-door nature of most corporate farming: He has made a video, in cooperation with the animal-welfare group Compassion in World Farming, in which he escorts cameras into his broiler barns.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry

New Analysis Says FDA Farm Antibiotic Reduction Won't Work As Planned

December 3, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Epsos.de (CC) on Flickr

Epsos.de (CC) on Flickr

A brand-new analysis of the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to restrict agricultural overuse of antibiotics brings some needed clarity to the subject — and calls into question how effective those plans will be.

The analysis, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts, examines whether the FDA’s request to veterinary pharma companies — to observe voluntary curbs on the antibiotics they sell — is actually going to make much difference in quantities of antibiotics that are used. And concludes: Maybe not.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, growth promoters

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 17
  • Next Page »

Copyright © 2025 · Maryn McKenna on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

© [fl_year} Maryn McKenna | Web Design Services by Sumy Designs, LLC

Facebook