Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Antibiotic Use in Chickens: Responsible for Hundreds of Human Deaths?

By Leave a Comment

In the long back and forth between science and agriculture over the source of antibiotic resistance in humans — Due to antibiotic overuse on farms, or in human medicine? — one question has been stubbornly hard to answer. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria do arise on farms, do they leave the farm and circulate in the wider world? And if they do, how much damage do they do?

A multi-national team of researchers recently published their answers to both questions. Their answer: In Europe, 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred.

[Read more…]

Drug Resistance in Food: Chicken, Shrimp, Even Lettuce (ICAAC 4)

By Leave a Comment

A final post from the ICAAC meeting, which concluded at one end of the Moscone Center in San Francisco Wednesday just as the Apple iPhone 5 launch was beginning at the building’s other end. (Definitely a crossing of geek streams.)

There’s far too much going on at a meeting like this to cover everything. So what emerges, as journalists move around the session rooms and exhibit floors, are stories regarding whatever caught a reporter’s eye based on his or her existing interests and news sense.

What caught my eye was a lot of research into foodborne illness, and particularly into the possibility of food being a reservoir for antibiotic resistance (which, constant readers will know, is something I’m interested in). [Read more…]

Resistant Gonorrhea: CDC Says Just One Drug Left

By Leave a Comment

Well, that didn’t take long.

Exactly 6 months after warning, in a major medical journal, that gonorrhea was becoming untreatable by the last two drugs commonly used against it, the Centers for Disease Control has taken one of those drugs off the table, leaving just one antibiotic available to treat the disease.

In a bulletin published today, the public health agency says that data from the national Gonococcal Isolate Surveillance Project shows a high enough percentage of resistance to the oral cephalosporin cefixime that “CDC no longer recommends cefixime at any dose as a first-line regimen for treatment of gonococcal infections.” Instead, it says, physicians should administer a single dose of injectable ceftriaxone, accompanied by some additional oral drugs.

This has been coming for a while, but it is still unnerving news. It means that the entire structure of sexually transmitted disease control in the United States — single doses of drugs given in single outpatient-clinic visits — now hangs on this one remaining drug. If ceftriaxone also becomes ineffective, then STD treatment will instead become a matter of giving drugs by IV: slower, more complicated, more expensive, and likely more difficult to access.

[Read more…]

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: Not Just A U.S. Problem

By Leave a Comment


If you’ve been reading along, you might remember that in the past year, there has been increasing alarm in the public health community about rising rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea, an almost-beaten sexually transmitted disease that has steadily become resistant to just about all the drugs that can be used against it in the outpatient clinics on which STD control relies. (If you haven’t been reading along, then first, Welcome, and second, here are one two three four posts about the problem.)

Highly resistant gonorrhea — which is to say, gonorrhea that has already become resistant to sulfa drugs, penicillin, tetracycline, and fluoroquinolones such as Cipro, and that is gaining resistance to cephalosporins — first emerged in Japan and over the past decade was carried to the western United States, and then crossed the country. But a recent issue of EuroSurveillance, the journal of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, warns that cases are now increasing in Europe, and exhibiting resistance against the last drug that both worked and was uncomplicated to use.

[Read more…]

More News: FDA Curbs One Class of Farm Drugs

By Leave a Comment

Here’s a bookend to the Food and Drug Administration’s disappointing Christmas Eve notice that it will cease trying to regulate the largest classes of growth-promoter antibiotics. Today, the agency announced that it is forbidding certain uses of a different class of drugs, cephalosporins.

To those who are concerned about antibiotic overuse in agriculture, though, this is good news — though it may be more good news-bad news-bad news-good news.

The dialectic looks like this:

[Read more…]