Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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E. Coli: Some Answers, Many Questions Still

June 24, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The past few days have seen the simultaneous publication of the first vetted medical-journal pieces on the vast European outbreak of E. coli O104. They’re fascinating for what they report that is new about this perplexing epidemic — now up to 3,802 cases including 43 deaths, according to the World Health Organization — and also for the further questions they raise.

Possibly most headline-worthy: Two reports in Eurosurveillance, Europe’s peer-reviewed open-access epidemiology journal, that suggest this strain is communicable from person to person and also produces unusual and troubling symptoms.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: E. coli, food, food policy, Germany, Science Blogs

Goodbye, Team D? When One State's Cuts Hurt Everyone

June 14, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Here’s a little tip that will make you feel like a public-health insider. The next time you read any news related to foodborne illness in the United States, look for this word:

Minnesota.

The chances are good that you’ll find it, probably buried deep in the footnotes. That’s not because Minnesota has particularly unhealthy food. (Disregard those 47 things on a stick served at the State Fair.) Instead, it’s because Minnesota has excellent food detectives.

Largely thanks to its Scandinavian sense of social responsibility — Minneapolis is still Scandinavian enough that the cashiers in my downtown grocery store spoke Swedish to the older customers — Minnesota has always been willing to support a crack state department of public health.

E. coli in hazelnuts packaged in California? Salmonella-bearing red pepper in salami made in Rhode Island? More Salmonella in peanut butter from Georgia? Even more Salmonella in peppers from Mexico? Anthrax from downed cattle? Crypto from chicken salad? Solved by MNDoH, every one.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: E. coli, foodborne, minnesota, salmonella, Science Blogs

E. coli: What we know and need to

June 8, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The stream of news from the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany has been so steady that it’s been hard to catch my breath long enough to post on it. The Robert Koch Institute in Germany said today that they think the epidemic curve is cresting, which makes me unusually late to the party. Nevertheless, since there are likely to be more cases and more deaths — and a long struggle still to understand what happened — I thought it would be useful to count up the things that we can say for sure, and those that remain puzzlingly open questions.

First: Is this the largest E. coli outbreak ever? According to food-safety uber-attorney Bill Marler, this outbreak — more than 2,600 victims, 13 countries, 26 deaths (Nature News has a great graphic of cases by country) — is dwarfed only by a 1996 epidemic in Japan. (Here’s Marler’s list). If it’s not the largest, it is likely to have produced the largest percentage of serious illness: As of today, there are 725 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (689 in Germany, 33 in the rest of Europe, three in the United States), according to WHO-Europe.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: E. coli, food, food policy, foodborne, Germany, Science Blogs

Drug-Resistant Bacteria: To Humans From Farms via Food

March 9, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

You have to love a scientific commentary that starts this in-your-face:

“Show us the science that use of antibiotics in animal production is causing this antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner of the National Pork Council told the Washington Post back in June 2010, responding to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance document advising against the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.

Well, here’s some.

To be clear: That’s the paper’s language, not mine. The gut-punch challenge comes from an editorial that is only on the web so far but is scheduled for publication in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection. It accompanies a research article that makes an important claim:

Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli — resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, E. coli, food, food policy, netherlands, Science Blogs

The food safety bill and the long cost of foodborne illness

December 21, 2010 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In a nailbiter ending tonight, the US House of Representatives passed the long-stalled, almost-lost, back-from-the-dead FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, a decades-overdue piece of legislation that will equip the US Food and Drug Administration with enforcement tools to help it prevent and track foodborne illness outbreaks.

For people who don’t know the regulatory landscape of food in the United States, it comes as a shock that FDA (which regulates both drugs used in food production and much of the food produced in the US, except for meat and poultry which are under USDA) has so little power. Until now, the FDA could not compel a food recall; it could only ask for a problematic or dangerous food to be recalled, and the food producer could demur. That was, if the FDA even associated a particular food with a foodborne outbreak, which was unlikely given its lack of surveillance resources or inspectors. (A remarkable number of foodborne outbreaks are solved not by the feds but by the Minnesota Department of Public Health, which is well-funded by the state it represents.) The last time food-safety legislation was updated in the US was 1938. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, E. coli, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, legislation, Science Blogs

Does ethanol production produce resistant bacteria too?

April 22, 2009 By Maryn Leave a Comment

One of the challenges of disappearing down the rabbit hole of a gnarly chapter — gee, it’s dark down here — is that I get behind on my RSS feeds, and suddenly every entry in my Google Reader is at 1000+ and it’s all just too daunting.

So, trying to catch up a bit, I found two related, interesting and troubling stories from the Associated Press (4 April) and the online magazine Grist (7 April — yes, I said I was behind…).

Synopsis/synthesis: Corn-based ethanol, former darling of the energy and large-scale agriculture industries, suddenly doesn’t look like such a good idea – and not just because the market for it is crashing. Turns out that ethanol is made by adding yeast and sugar to corn mash; the yeast convert the carbohydrates to the alcohol that is the basis of the fuel. (Yes, just like making beer.) However, the mash is particularly attractive to Lactobacillus and other bacteria that produce lactic acid as a waste product rather than alcohol, and a tank full of lactic acid doesn’t make very good fuel. So, to keep the bacteria under control, ethanol producers add antibiotics. Specifically, penicillin and erythromycin — you’ll recognize those — and tylosin and virginiamycin, two macrolides, related to erythromycin, that are approved in the US for veterinary use.

Now, the problem with this practice, as you might predict, is that if the mash is not appropriately dosed, the presence of antibiotics within it can prompt some of the bacteria to develop resistance. (Here’s an article from the trade magazine Ethanol Producer discussing just that possibility.)

And the further complication of this is that the leftover mash, now called “distillers’ grains,” is sold as animal feed. Ask yourself: Where in animal production are animals most likely to eat grains? Answer: At finishing, in feedlots. In other words, fermented grains that may contain antibiotic residue, and may contain resistant bacteria, are being sold as feed to animals that are already being raised in conditions that have been shown to foster the development of resistant bacteria through subtherapeutic and prophylactic antibiotic use. In fact, some research has drawn an explicit link: Kansas State University scientists have found higher levels of E. coli O157 in the guts of cattle that were fed distillers’ grains.

All of this was new to me, but there’s an additional facet to the story that the AP and Grist pieces don’t highlight, and that just makes my head hurt: the use of virginiamycin. For those new to the story, virginiamycin is an allowed, widely used veterinary antibiotic in the US. However, it is not used in the European Union: It was banned there in 1998 because the EU’s ag authorities believed that it promoted resistance to the drug Synercid (quinupristin+dalfopristin), which is a drug of last resort against vancomycin-resistant bacteria such as VRE. (Here’s a Lancet paper that talks about that resistance mechanism.) Synercid was approved by the FDA in 1999 — two years after Synercid resistance had already been found in the US. (For a long but cogent explanation of the complex story of virginiamycin, see the book The Killers Within.)

So, just to recap: We have an industry whose long-term earnings are shaky, whose economic survival is partially secured by the sale of its waste product, and which via that waste product is putting antibiotic residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria into the environment, and is conveying them into food animals, and is making particular use of an antibiotic that other countries have banned because they believe that, via its use in animals, it exerts an adverse impact on human health.

Something to remember the next time ethanol subsidies come up.

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, E. coli, Europe, food, food policy, Science Blogs

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