Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Speaking and Teaching
  • Audio & Video
    • Audio
    • Video
  • Journalism
    • Articles
    • Past Newspaper Work
  • Books
    • Big Chicken
    • SuperBug
    • Beating Back the Devil
  • Bio
  • Home

2015 Resolution: Accept that Diseases Hop Borders, Don't Dismiss Them, and Don't Panic

January 3, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Cogdog (CC), Flickr

Cogdog (CC), Flickr

Happy New Year, constant readers. There’s no question that the big public health story of 2014 was Ebola. The African epidemic has now racked up more than 20,000 cases, according to the World Health Organization, which has put together a useful map and timeline of developments since March. If you’d like to look back on the year, the best sum-up by far is the New York Times’ long and beautifully told “How Ebola Roared Back,” and for a sense of what we learned this year — and what we still don’t know — consider reading Helen Branswell’s account, published at the Winnipeg Free Press.

The international health community still must focus on Ebola; the disease is by no means contained. But my New Year’s wish, for those of us outside that community, is that we begin 2015 by accepting that wherever diseases occur, they are going to travel. We had repeated demonstrations of this with Ebola; and as a global community, we didn’t react well. (If you feel like revisiting the cringe-making details, the Today in Ebolanoia Tumblr is still up.)

The disease that really makes this case, though, is the antibiotic resistance factor NDM. Since its original discovery in one person in Sweden in 2008, this snippet of DNA — which makes common infections essentially untreatable — has been carried by patients to at least 40 countries, and spread within those countries to create local hospital outbreaks.

That’s a lot of border-crossing.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Ebola, NDM, NDM-1

Very Serious Superbugs in Imported Seafood

June 11, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Matsuyuki, Flickr

Image: Matsuyuki/ Flickr

Breaking news today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, out of its open-access journal Emerging Infectious Diseases: Researchers in Canada have identified a very highly resistant bacterium in squid imported from South Korea and being sold in a Chinese grocery store.

The letter reporting the finding was supposed to go live at noon ET, but hasn’t yet. When it does, it will be linked from this page, under the subheading Letters. It is titled: “Carbapenamase-Producing Organism in Food, 2014.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CDC, food policy, food safety, NDM, NDM-1, Resistance

World Health Organization: Antibiotic Resistance Grave Global Problem

May 5, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

NathanReading-staph

Image: Nathan Reading (CC), Flickr

The World Health Organization has released a significant report marking what I think must be the first attempt to quantify antibiotic resistance globally. It’s a very sobering read — not just for what the data says about the advance of resistance worldwide, but also because of what the organization could not say, because the data doesn’t exist.

The numbers themselves are unsettling. Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director general, told the press: “It’s clear that rates are very high of resistance among bacteria causing many of the most common serious infections – the ones that we see both occurring in the community as well as in hospitals … In all regions of the world, we now see that hospitals are reporting untreatable, or nearly untreatable, infections.”

But the gaps in the numbers are too: There are 194 member countries in the WHO, but only 114 had the data-gathering resources to contribute something to the report, and only 22 were able to send in data on the most important occurrences of resistance in very common bacteria. Thus it’s possible that the report could be an under-estimate, or an over-estimate. But I can’t think of a scenario in which it could be considered substantially inaccurate. Its portrait of a world in which antibiotic resistance is advancing to grave proportions ought to be taken seriously.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CRE, E. coli, gonorrhea, NDM, Resistance, Who

NDM: "A Great Challenge for the Future of Healthcare"

April 29, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Jason Scragz (CC), Flickr

Jason Scragz (CC), Flickr

A paper published this week reminded me to take a fresh look at NDM, the “Indian superbug” — actually a gene and enzyme — that got so much attention, including from me, in 2011. (Most of the posts are here.) Quick reminder: NDM surfaced in 2008 in Sweden, then was found in the United Kingdom, then in the United States and then elsewhere in the world. It had several distinctive qualities. It appeared in gut bacteria such as Klebsiella and E. coli, and caused infections when those bacteria escaped the gut and got elsewhere in the body. It rendered those bacteria not-vulnerable to almost all antibiotics, leaving so few drugs to use against it that medical personnel found it truly alarming. And it had strong links to South Asia: The first known patient was an Indian man living in Sweden who had gone home for a visit and been hospitalized; victims found later either had family links to India and Pakistan or had gotten medical care there, as medical tourists or because they were injured while traveling.

NDM (which stands for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase; it was originally NDM-1, but there are now at least seven variants) generated a lot of alarm at the time, with good reason. Its unusual resistance pattern made useless the last category of broad-spectrum, last-resort antibiotics, called carbapenems, that were still working reliably. Physicians treating patients who had infections involving NDM had to hunt among just a few remaining drugs that were still on the shelf because they were toxic or did not work reliably. Plus, because bacteria carrying the NDM resistance factor colonize the gut, the infection could be transported across borders and into hospitals without anyone noticing. With no symptoms showing, few hospitals would bother to check a patient (or a family member), especially since testing for gut bacteria is more complicated and intimate than, for instance, testing someone’s nostrils for MRSA.

By last year, NDM had mostly dropped out of the headlines, even though it was still moving across the globe (this 2013 paper details countries where it has been identified), and had also begun causing hospital outbreaks (for instance, this one in Denver in 2012). So the new paper I mentioned, written by staff from Public Health England and analyzing the first 250 patients with NDM in the UK, is a useful reminder of how formidable a microbiologic foe this can be.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CRE, NDM, NDM-1, Resistance

Traveling Abroad? Careful What You Carry Back… In Your Guts

April 10, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: Ariel Zamblich/WIRED

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

If you do any kind of challenging travel — adventure travel, backpacking, even just going to less-developed parts of the world — you’ve probably evolved some sort of protective routine. You get shots, take your malaria medication, wash raw things before eating them and take a water filter for the bad places. (Please tell me you do this. Condoms, too.)

But a new study just published in EuroSurveillance, the peer-reviewed journal of Europe’s equivalent of the CDC, raises the possibility that even if you are doing the right thing, you could pick up some very nasty stuff while you’re abroad — and that what you bring back could endanger not only you, but others around you as well. A team of French researchers reports that healthy travelers who had no contact with foreign medical systems brought back extremely drug-resistant bacteria, probably just from drinking water, and that the bacteria persisted in their guts for at least two months after they came home.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, ECDC, EU, NDM

Copyright © 2023 · Maryn McKenna on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

© 2017 Maryn McKenna | Site by Sumy Designs, LLC

Facebook