Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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MRSA in UK Turkeys Raises Questions of Communication, Transparency and Risk

December 2, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: OZinOH (CC), Flickr

Two years ago, I celebrated Thanksgiving here on Superbug by announcing some new studies on resistant bacteria being found in turkey meat in the US. That did not go over well; so this year, I saved the bad-turkey news for the post-holiday week. And here you go:

Just in time for our Thanksgiving — and in the ramp-up to English Christmas, for which turkey is a traditional dish — the UK’s Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency announced that livestock-associated MRSA, drug-resistant staph, has been found in UK poultry for the first time. From their not-very-informative press release:

The Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) has identified the presence of Livestock-Associated Meticillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (LA-MRSA) in poultry on a farm in East Anglia… Once the poultry have been slaughtered and sold the owner will carry out cleansing and disinfection of their accommodation to ensure the next birds do not become colonised when they arrive on site. The AHVLA will revisit the farm after depopulation and thorough cleansing and disinfection to determine whether LA-MRSA is still present.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, food policy, food safety, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, ST398, Turkey, UK

There's a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government's Shut Down

October 7, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: BokChoi-Snowpea (CC), Flickr

Late-breaking news, and I’ll update as I find out more: While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278 illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.

“FSIS is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific production period,” the agency said in an emailed alert. “The outbreak is continuing.”

(Updates to this post are at the bottom.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, chicken, FDA, foodborne, FSIS, salmonella, Science Blogs, Shutdown, USDA

News Round-Up: Food, Foodborne Illness, And Antibiotic Resistance In Food

May 5, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

OK, still catching up. Today: food, foodborne illness, and antibiotic use and resistance in food — lots of news in a multi-item rundown. (Under normal circumstances, I’d give each of these items a post of its own; but since they all happened in the past few weeks, it seems better to note them and move on.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CDC, consumer reports, E. coli, EIS, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs, Turkey

Why We Can't See Inside Poultry Production, and What Might Change if We Could

January 29, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

 

In the past months, there have been several troubling research reports, from different parts of the world, exploring aspects of the same problem: Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health.

Here are a few of the publications:

  • From the US Department of Agriculture and University of Georgia, which has probably the deepest poultry-science research bench in the United States, an analysis of multi-drug resistant E. coli found on broiler chicken carcasses.
  • From several institutions in Germany, an analysis that finds “alarmingly high” levels of multi-drug resistant bacteria on retail chicken — including on organic chicken, which the authors say may be due to bacterial colonization of chicks before they are bought by organic producers.
  • From the Czech Republic, a report that bacteria found on chicken there are resistant to an additional class of drugs important in human medicine, fluoroquinolones.
  • From a multi-national team, a look at the close resemblance of multi-drug resistant E. coli between poultry and humans in several countries including the United States.
  • And most recently, two more European reports, from the Netherlands and from Sweden, of high rates of multi-drug resistant bacteria on chicken meat (and in the Netherlands paper, a comparison to resistant bacteria in humans as well).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, chicken, food, food policy, food safety, foodborne, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

One Family's Journey From Foodborne-Illness Victim to "Food Patriots"

December 19, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A quick post today, because I have deadlines, and because this Kickstarter closes tomorrow and you should take a look at it while you can.

In February of 2006, when he was 16 years old, Sam Spitz went out for lunch with his high school pals. They were athletes, and looking for a big meal, so they went to a pizza-pasta place. Sam, though, had an inkling of healthy eating from his mother, Jennifer Amdur Spitz, who liked to shop at farmers’ markets. He chose a chicken Caesar salad instead.

By the end of the school day, it seemed like a bad choice. He developed diarrhea so severe that Jennifer and his dad, Jeff Spitz, had to tape an adult diaper on him to get him to the emergency room. The ER staff assumed it was a foodborne illness, took a culture, and sent them home with a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

It had no effect. It took weeks, along with visits to specialists and more tests and more drugs and eventually a colonoscopy, before the family discovered that what had felled the strapping young athlete was an antibiotic-resistant foodborne illness: Campylobacter, a bug that frequently travels on chicken.

Sam Spitz was seriously sick for a month and recovering for many more. He was a pitcher, but missed his entire baseball season, along with the chance to be inspected by college recruiters. He was still on restricted activity when the football recruiters came around the following fall. He eventually recovered (and played football for University of Wisconsin) — but his family’s attitude toward food and food safety was forever changed.

The Spitzes, who are award-winning filmmakers, have documented their journey to a better understanding of our food system in a new film that they are now polishing, called “Food Patriots.” In it, they talk not only about their own dawning understanding of how our food is produced, but also about many other people who are trying to get food grown and distributed in a healthier, more equitable way.

“We were really insulated, as a family, from knowing where our food comes from, and from having the awareness that allows you to make healthy choices,” Jennifer told me. “But this film has a much bigger footprint than just our journey. We’re in it to provide a narrative, and some humor — but what we do is look at people who are inspiring us to think about, buy and eat food differently.”

The Spitzes are in their last 24 hours on their Kickstarter. They have made their initial goal, which was to fund post-production — but in the last day, they’ve been offered a match by a major donor. Anything they receive today will be doubled by the donor, and those funds will be spent getting the film out to communities for screenings.

Jennifer described the film to me as “zero-depth” — like the kind of public pool where you can stand at the end with just your toes wet, and move deeper at your own pace. “There have been a lot of scary, hit-you-over-the-head food films already, and people have already responded to that approach,” she said. “We don’t preach. We want to get people into conversation.”

Take a look.

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Footnote: If antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter sounds at all familiar, it may be because I wrote about it in my two-year investigation of foodborne illness for SELF Magazine last summer. Here’s that story and my post about it.

Flickr/mollyeh11/CC

 

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: chicken, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self

Advice for the Annual Observance of Food-Poisoning, Umm, Thanksgiving Day

November 20, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

My grandparents — children of Irish and Scottish immigrants, for whom calories per penny was a much more important food value than fine cuisine — had a little mnemonic for Thanksgiving. It went like this:

Turkey, tetrazzini, ptomaine.

Perhaps that requires a little explanation.

The turkey part should be self-evident. Tetrazzini — a cream-sauce casserole based on spaghetti, one of those early 20th-century dishes invented to honor Italian opera stars — was what they did the second day with the turkey leftovers. Ptomaine (the “p” is silent) was what they worried lay in wait for them on the third. A late 19th-century term that has passed out of use, it derived from the notion that poisonous compounds lurked in rotting food.

For people who grew up before the antibiotic era — and who learned to cook when refrigerators were literal ice chests that kept things cool at best — “food poisoning” was a reasonable fear, and a risk they refused to take. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, no matter how delicious it appeared, whatever remained of the turkey went into the trash.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs, Thanksgiving, Turkey, USDA

Becoming Part of the Story (Maybe): The Peanut Butter Recall

October 5, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment


Earlier this week, something happened to me that happens to at least 48 million people in the United States every year: I got a foodborne illness. After a completely normal weekend and Monday, I woke in the middle of the night unusually thirsty; I glugged a big glass of water and stumbled back to bed. I got up Tuesday morning still thirsty, feeling kind of chilled and sluggish, and with no appetite. I skipped my usual fruit and yogurt, downed my usual two cups of coffee, skipped my usual hour-long walk and went to my desk.

About two hours later, my abdomen started to cramp.

About 30 minutes after that, I realized it would be a good idea if I went into the bathroom fairly soon.

I was there for a while. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, food, food policy, foodborne, salmonella, Science Blogs

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

August 31, 2012 By Maryn 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…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, China, counterfeit, drugs, food, food policy, food safety, foodborne, meat, MRSA, Reuters, russia, Science Blogs, South Korea, TB

The Superbugs In Your Dinner: A Storify

June 7, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As I said Wednesday would happen, I participated in a Twitterchat today about antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses arising as a result of agricultural antibiotic use. This is the subject of my investigative piece in the June issue of SELF Magazine. Chat participants were me and blogger and cancer survivor Lisa Bonchek Adams, with many constant readers checking in. And because I’m sure you were all busy, but I want you to know what we talked about, I made a Storify for you. You’re welcome.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self, twitter

The Superbugs in Your Dinner (Bonus: Twitterchat!)

June 6, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new story up at SELF Magazine, where I’m privileged to do a long and often investigative piece about once a year. This one is close to my heart: It took two years to complete, and in that time I conducted 37 interviews and reviewed several hundred scientific papers.

Here’s what it says: The misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, particularly in livestock-raising, is creating antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses that are taking victims and their doctors by surprise.

We talk pretty often here about drug-resistant bacteria arising as a result of farm antibiotic use, and moving off the farm in a variety of ways. There is a lot of dispute, of course, about whether farm-caused antibiotic resistance has much effect on human health, or whether the various resistant illnesses that people contract arise instead from antibiotic misuse in daily life or in hospitals and health care.

But in this case, the illnesses are being caused specifically by classic foodborne bugs that have become resistant and are making people sick when the food is handled or eaten. The evidence is not 100 percent — no evidence ever is — but to me, these illnesses demonstrate the most direct link yet between antibiotic use on farms, and human illness far away from farm areas.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self

Food Trade Too Complex to Track Food Safety

June 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The data-dense graphic above may be too reduced to read (here’s the really big version), but its intricacy masks a simple and fairly dire message: The global trade in food has become so complex that we have almost lost the ability to trace the path of any food sold into the network. And, as a result, we are also about to lose the ability to track any contaminated food, or any product causing foodborne illness.

The graphic, and warning, come from a paper published last week in PLoS ONE by researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Hungary and Romania. The group used United Nations food-trade data — along with some math that I do not pretend to understand — to describe an “international agro-food trade network” (IFTN) with seven countries at its center, but a dense web of connections with many others. Each of the seven countries, they find, trades with more than 77 percent of all the 207 countries on which the UN gathers information.

As a result, they say: “The IFTN has become a densely interwoven complex network, creating a perfect platform to spread potential contaminants with practically untraceable origins.”

[Read more…]

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

Does Foodborne Illness Trigger Lifelong Health Problems?

March 30, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new column up at Scientific American about a health issue that is really just starting to be discussed: Whether foodborne illness causes long-term health problems, and therefore whether it should be a higher medical and public-health priority than it is now.

Quick summary: The few studies that have followed victims of foodborne illness for years afterward show that later in life, they suffer higher-than-usual rates not only of digestive trouble, but of arthritis and kidney problems, as well as greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, food, food policy, foodborne, SciAm, Science Blogs

Bats, Booze, Bugs, Birds, Blood and Bushmeat (ICEID 4)

March 15, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Since I started electing to do blog coverage of scientific meetings, I’ve run into an unfortunate reality. On any meeting day, there are one or two presentations that either are strikingly newsworthy or fit into an ongoing topic that I’m already interested in, and that therefore I feel obliged to write about. That means I’m unable to cover dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other interesting papers and posters.

I feel bad about this, especially when authors stop what they are doing to talk to me. So here’s my admittedly insufficient remedy: a quick round-up of a few of the hundreds of intriguing presentations this past week at the biennial International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. (Program here; it’s a pdf, abstracts not individually searchable.) Apologies to everyone whom I didn’t get to.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: C.diff, dengue, E. coli, foodborne, Hospitals, influenza, salmonella, Science Blogs

Gastroenteritis Deaths, Foodborne Outbreaks Increase (ICEID 3)

March 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Several related pieces of news today from the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases:

  • The number of people who are dying from illnesses that involve vomiting and diarrhea more than doubled between 1999 and 2007, and most of the increase was due to Clostridium difficile.
  • Disease outbreaks caused by imported foods are rising, and tainted foods are coming into the United States from a wider array of countries than before.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: C.diff, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs

25 Dead From Melons: FDA Points to Packing Facility

October 21, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Federal health authorities have determined responsibility for the vast 26-state outbreak of Listeria in cantaloupes, almost three months  — and 123 illnesses, 25 deaths and one miscarriage —  since it began.

In a long report released this week, they say they found Listeria not in the fields where the melons were grown, but in the packing and cold storage facilities on the single large farm where they all came from; and, in addition, they identified some practices on the farm that may have caused Listeria contamination or allowed it to multiply.

Just as a reminder of what was at stake here since we last talked about it: This is the first time that Listeria was found on cantaloupe in the United States, meaning there wasn’t a lot of past science to draw on. And this was a huge outbreak: The farm had 480 acres in cantaloupe, and shipped more than 300,000 cases of it. The number of fruit involved, according to MSNBC.com, may have been as high as 4 million.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs

Cantaloupe Outbreak: 13 Dead, 18 States, More To Come

September 28, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I’ve been away at a couple of very interesting conferences — more on those soon — so I’m late to this story; on the other hand, the story hasn’t even peaked yet, and thus there’s plenty of time for us to catch up.

So: An outbreak of foodborne illness that appears to be spread by fresh cantaloupes has sickened 72 people so far, in 18 states, and 13 have died. According to investigators, the source of the contamination has not yet been found. And also, according to a media briefing today, the contaminated cantaloupes were also shipped overseas, to countries that investigators would not identify. And, as an extra bonus, the tally of cases and deaths is likely to keep rising, because the particular illness in this outbreak has an incubation period of up to two months.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs

Big News But: USDA Bans "Other" E. coli Strains

September 13, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Good news, but not excellent news, today from the US Department of Agriculture: It has agreed that, starting in March 2012, six more strains of E. coli will be considered “adulterants,” putting them in the same regulatory category as the much-feared E. coli O157:H7.

It is a big step, to do this. Those six bacterial bad actors — technically, E. coli O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, and O145 — are now responsible for the majority of foodborne illness caused by E.coli in the United States, causing almost twice as much illness each year as O157 does.

[Read more…]

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

Resistant Salmonella: Deadly Yet Somehow Not Illegal

August 5, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As the scale of the nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg started to sink in Thursday — along with the stunningly large recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey, much of it probably already eaten — there were a number of moments that made a careful listener need to stop and just think.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, E. coli, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs

Highly Resistant Salmonella: Poultry, Antibiotics, Borders, Risk

August 3, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’re a strain of Salmonella, it’s a very good week. If you’re a human, not so much.

There are two stories occurring simultaneously that underline the rising danger of drug-resistant organisms in the food supply, and the porousness of networks for detecting the dangerous bugs in time.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, salmonella, Science Blogs

E. coli: A Risk for 3 More Years From Who Knows Where

July 7, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The latest news from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the EU’s CDC, suggests that the massive outbreak of E. coli O104 is declining. The number of new cases being discovered has fallen, and the most recent onset of illness among confirmed cases was June 27. The  toll is now 752 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome and an additional 3,016 cases of illness in 13 countries, for a total of 3,768 illnesses including 44 deaths. (The EU adjusted that total to remove 161 cases that were suspected but not lab-confirmed. It also did not include the five confirmed cases, one suspect case and one suspect death in the United States.)

But a simultaneous report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reveals that, despite the epidemic curve’s trending down, the outbreak can’t be considered over. The ultimate source — the contaminated seeds from which salad sprouts were grown — has been so widely distributed that no one really knows where they have gone or for how long they might remain for sale. One prediction, based on the probable package labeling, is that they could remain on shelves for three more years.

[Read more…]

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

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