Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

2012 In The Rear-View Mirror: What You Liked

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Happy New Year, constant readers. For the second year in a row, here’s my list of which of my posts (91 in 2012!) most moved you to react. Last year (find that list here), I counted down based on which posts provoked the most comments. This year, Wired installed a tweet-counter — which registers only if someone clicks through from Twitter, but not if the post’s URL is mentioned or RT’d — so I thought it would be amusing to score posts that way this year.

And the verdict is: You care enormously about food policy, but you continue to be fascinated by the emergence of scary diseases — and, to my surprise and pleasure, you care about public understanding of science as well.

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Why Is Type 1 Diabetes Rising Worldwide?

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We’ve gotten sadly accustomed by now to warnings about obesity and its effect on health: joint damage, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and its complications such as blindness and amputation. We almost take for granted that as obesity increases worldwide, diabetes will also, and it is. That is, type 2 diabetes — the kind that is linked to obesity and used to be called adult-onset diabetes — is rising as obesity does.

But here’s a puzzle: Type 1 diabetes — the autoimmune disease that begins in childhood and used to be called juvenile-onset diabetes — is rising too, around the globe, at 3 percent to 5 percent per year. And at this point, no one can quite say why.

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Antibiotics: Connected to Obesity, Diabetes and Stroke?

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In consideration of your glaze-eyed tryptophan coma — at least among those who weren’t frightened off by the MRSA-in-turkey news — today’s post is mostly composed of brightly colored pictures. (Also, speculation. You’ve been warned.)

About a week ago, a nonprofit research group called Extending the Cure published the latest in a fantastic series of maps they have been producing for several years, based on public and privately collected data. Earlier iterations have looked at the incidence of various resistant organisms over time. This time, they decided to look instead at the major drivers of resistance, and focused on national data about antibiotic prescriptions, broken down by drug type and by state between 1999 and 2007.

The graphics they produced document both a troubling growth in the use of some precious (because still effective) antibiotic classes, and also a surprising differential in the amounts of antibiotics prescribed in different parts of the country. The rate of use of antibiotics, measured by outpatient prescriptions per 1,000 inhabitants, varied from a low of 533 in Alaska to a high of 1,214 in West Virginia. [Read more…]

Antibiotics: Killing Off Beneficial Bacteria … for Good?

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It’s an accepted concept by now that taking antibiotics in order to quell an infection disrupts the personal microbiome, the population of microorganisms that we all carry around in our guts, and which vastly outnumbers the cells that make up our bodies. That recognition supports our understanding of Clostridium difficile disease — killing the beneficial bacteria allows C. diff room to surge and produce an overload of toxins — as well as the intense interest in establishing a research program that could demonstrate experimentally whether the vast industry producing probiotic products is doing what it purports to do.

But implicit in that concept is the expectation that, after a while — after a course of antibiotics ends — the gut flora repopulate and their natural balance returns.

What if that expectation were wrong?

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WCSJ: Maybe The Biggest Disease Threat Isn't Infectious At All

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I’ve been away the past week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, a biannual gathering that brought 726 writers and broadcasters from 87 countries to Doha, Qatar. I was there to give a presentation about blogging, and also because I organized two panels on under-reported epidemics and on food and farming issues in the developing world. My panelists’ testimony was so powerful that I wanted to share some of the details.

Going into the conference, the epidemics panel was my favorite. That’s not because I cheated and made myself one of the speakers, but because it brought into public view so many of the disease-control issues that we talk about here. When I say hidden epidemics, what I mean is this: The diseases that routinely grab headlines are almost never the ones that cost society the most in illness and deaths, and also in money to control and repair them.

Think of Ebola, for instance. There has never been a case of human Ebola in the United States. And as I’ve written before, viral hemorrhagic fevers repeatedly have been imported to North America without ever starting an outbreak. Yet whenever Ebola sparks in Africa, it earns scare-font headlines here, as though it were about to rampage across the continent — even though, in all its known engagements with humans, Ebola has killed less than one-tenth of the 19,000 that MRSA, for instance, kills in the US in a single year.

I asked a set of distinguished health journalists, all friends, to come to Doha to talk about diseases that deserve headlines, but never get them. Here’s what they said:

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