Maryn McKenna

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More On The New Coronavirus: Cases in France, The WHO In Saudi Arabia

May 12, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

My last two posts looked at the problems that might be caused by hospital spread of the new coronavirus, based on what happened during the early days of SARS 10 years ago. Hospital spread of this new virus is a real concern; it was first identified, retrospectively, in an outbreak in a hospital in Jordan a year ago, and international concern really picked up after the acknowledgement of a current outbreak in the Al-Ahsa region of Saudi Arabia. Now it appears there is a third instance of hospital spread, in France. Several days ago the French Ministry of Health announced a single case, a Frenchman who had traveled to Dubai and may have been infected there. This morning, there is news of a second case, a person who shared a hospital room with the first patient. Here’s the announcement from the French Ministry and one from the World Health Organization. (And if you read French, I talk to the French newspaper Le Figaro about it here.) Simultaneously, the WHO has announced that two more patients have been recognized in that Saudi hospital cluster. That makes 15 patients (three of whom died) in that cluster, and 34 patients (18 deaths) worldwide.

There’s additional news today as well, which is both heartening and a little concerning too.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, coronavirus, france, hCoV-EMC, MERS, NCoV, SARS, Saudi Arabia, Science Blogs, transparency, Who

Fast-Spreading Animal Virus Leaps Europe, UK Borders

February 7, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo:

A newly identified disease is moving rapidly through livestock in Europe and has authorities both worried and puzzled. The disease, dubbed Schmallenberg virus for a town in west-central Germany where one of the first outbreaks occurred, makes adult animals only mildly ill, but causes lambs, kids and calves to be born dead or deformed.

The United Kingdom’s Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AVHLA) said today that the virus has been found on 29 farms in England; in the past few weeks they found it in sheep, but today announced that they have identified it in cattle as well. In mainland Europe, it has been identified on several hundred farms in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and most recently in France. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has said that the new virus’s closest relatives do not cause disease in humans — but that other more distantly related viruses do:

The new virus belongs to the Bunyaviridae family, genus Orthobunyavirus, Simbu serogroup (preliminary information, based solely on genetic information)… Genetic characterisation has shown that the new virus is closest to the following Simbu serogroup viruses: Shamonda-, Aino- and Akabane-viruses, which do not cause disease in humans.
However, at least 30 orthobunyaviruses are zoonotic and may cause disease in humans, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe — e.g. La Crosse encephalitis virus, California Encephalitis virus, Cache Valley virus, Batai virus, Tahyna virus, Inkoo virus, Snowshoe Hare virus, Iquitos virus and Oropouche virus.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, france, Germany, netherlands, Science Blogs, UK

Government Health Agency Agrees Mega-Farms Are A Health Risk (In The UK)

November 4, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s very odd sometimes watching how the same issues play out in different parts of the world. The French environment ministry confidently ascribes the growth of seaweed choking its beaches to farm runoff. The European Parliament denounces the establishment of very large-scale “meat factories.” China (China!) enacts a ban on growth-promoting uses of antibiotics in agriculture.

Here in the United States, on the other hand, the government gropes unsuccessfully for a way to put controls on confinement agriculture, despite evidence of its environmental harm, while at the same time those farms grow by an estimated 4,600 hogs and 5,800 broiler chickens per day.

For more of that difference between Europe and the US, look this week to England, where the Health Protection Agency has just rejected the zoning application for a hog farm that was small by US standards, with a plan for only 2,500 sows producing about 20,000 piglets. The HPA said:

… those living up to 150 meters downwind of an intensive swine farming installation could be at risk of adverse human health effects associated with exposure to multi-drug resistant organisms. (this .pdf, p.30 of 44)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, China, england, Europe, food, food policy, france, pigs, Resistance, Science Blogs

Attack of the Deadly Slime: Farm Effluent Ruins French Beaches

July 26, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Vacationers in northwest France are being warned to stay away from beaches, which are growing a bumper crop of a seaweed that releases a potentially toxic gas. The culprit: Up-stream releases of manure from intensive farming that overload the near-shore waters with nitrates.

The seaweed (sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca) must be removed within 48 hours of washing ashore — because as it rots, it releases so much hydrogen sulfide that swimmers and strollers are endangered. The French ministry for health and the environment has warned visitors to avoid areas with overgrowth, and told workers scooping up the seaweed that they must wear monitors to alert them they have entered especially toxic pockets and must clear out within minutes.

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Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, france, Science Blogs

"Pig MRSA": New human infections in France

December 10, 2010 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s one of the touchiest topics under the broad category of antibiotic resistance: Whether the drug-resistant organisms that emerge on farms as a result of antibiotic use stay on farms, or pose a risk to humans who have no connection to agriculture.

That drug resistance emerges under any selective pressure is basic biology: Resistance is an inevitable process. That they emerge on farms when antibiotics are used broadly — that is, in growth-promoting or prophylactic ways, not to treat disease in individual animals — really isn’t in dispute any more. It’s now a question of economics and politics, not science. (See this bibliography, stretching back to 1969; and the news I broke yesterday of FDA’s estimate of US farms using almost 29 million pounds of antibiotics last year.)

So the argument over farm antibiotic use now tends to focus on whether the resistant organisms that emerge on farms are only an issue within a farm’s confines, or rather pose a broader human health threat — and that’s where the continuing story of the “third epidemic” of MRSA becomes so important. Recapping, this is a strain known as MRSA ST398 that emerged in pigs and passed to pig farmers in the Netherlands in 2004, subsequently spread across the European Union, and crossed to Canada and then to the United States. (Key posts on ST398: here, here, here and this archive at my old site. Yes, it will be moved soon, promise.)

Most of the identifications of MRSA ST398 in humans, including those first identifications above, were colonizations, the term for symptomless carriage of staph in the nostrils and on the skin; in other words, it wasn’t making people sick. News of actual illnesses has been rare — especially illnesses among people who have no contact with farming, such as the post-surgical infections found in Canada earlier this year.

But they’re getting a little less rare, as demonstrated by a letter just posted ahead-of-print to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It recounts the finding, via annual surveys of bloodstream infections, of four cases of ST398 in four different hospitals in France. One may have been due to animal exposure. Three were hospital-acquired.

Examination of patient histories revealed exposure to animals in 1 case, a fatal idiopathic community-acquired bloodstream infection in an 84-year-old man who lived on a farm at which 1 pig was being raised. The remaining cases were hospital-acquired and included 1 case of catheter-associated infection observed in a 58-year-old man with advanced multiple myeloma, 1 case following elective digestive tract surgery in a 69-year-old woman, and 1 case following cardiac surgery in a 68-year-old man.

There’s an especially interesting thing about these cases. In Europe and the US, ST398 has particular characteristics: It is resistant to tetracycline (the drug most commonly given to pigs) and does not manufacture the toxin Panton-Valentine leukocidin or PVL, which is suspected to be a cause of community-strain MRSA’s uncommon virulence. (See this story, from the book SUPERBUG, of how PVL-positive pneumonia almost killed a toddler.) The strain in the French cases, though, does manufacture PVL, and shares some virulence characteristics with the dominant community strain, USA300. It is less like the European strain of livestock-associated MRSA and more like a livestock-associated strain that appears to be emerging in China, ST9 (more on that here).

The argument against the significance of these cases is likely to be that they are, again, just one data-point, and may be just rare and random. That is worth considering. But it is also worth considering that they continue to be found.

And, also, that the community epidemic of MRSA was first flagged in a discovery of 25 cases in children in Chicago back in 1998, a finding that was also dismissed at the time as rare and random — and that grew into an epidemic of millions of cases a year.

(H/t to constant reader Pat Gardiner for flagging this paper for me.)

Cite: van der Mee-Marquet N et al. Emergence of Unusual Bloodstream Infections Associated with Pig-Borne–Like Staphylococcus aureus ST398 in France. Clin Infect Dis. (2011) 52 (1): 152-153. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciq053

Image via Flickr user johnmuk under CC

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, food, food policy, france, MRSA, Resistance, Science Blogs, ST398

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