Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Update on the Found Vials: There Weren't 6; There Were 327. (Not All of Them Were Smallpox)

July 16, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Variola, CDC

Variola, CDC

I was away reporting most of today, and while I was out, a few federal emails landed in my mail with what probably sounded like a  thud. One was an official announcement from the Food and Drug Administration; the others were copies of FDA and NIH emails that people there thought I should see.

They all said the same thing: The six vials of smallpox virus found in an FDA cold-storage room on the National Institutes of Health campus July 1 and announced by the CDC last week had company. A lot of company: 321 other vials. Some of them contained other “select agents,” infectious pathogens considered serious enough — for the illness they create, or the lack of a vaccine to prevent or drugs to treat them — to be considered potential bioterror agents.

(If you’ve missed this story so far, catch up here, here, here and here.)

Here’s the gist of the FDA’s external announcement:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, NIH, smallpox

The Leader of the Smallpox Eradication Effort Speaks About the Virus' Rediscovery

July 14, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Variola, CDC

Variola, CDC

Those of us who write about infectious diseases faced a conundrum last week, when the news broke that 60-year-old vials containing viable smallpox virus had been found on the National Institutes of Health campus. A responsible reporter always wants to talk to the experts in any subject. But when it comes to smallpox, experts can be hard to find.

Smallpox was one of the world’s worst killers, from prehistory through the first half of the 20th century. Yet there has not been a case of the dreadful disease anywhere since 1978, so few physicians working today have seen one. The virus is supposed to exist in only two highly secure stockpiles, so few scientists do research on it. And the aggressive campaign that chased the disease from the globe — the only human infection for which that claim can be made — ended 34 years ago. Many of the men and women who led it are in retirement, and a number have died.

Fortunately, the physician who headed that international campaign — 85-year-old Donald Ainslie Henderson, universally known as D.A. — is still working in public health, as a distinguished scholar at the bioterrorism-focused Center for Health Security of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Henderson literally wrote the book on smallpox — twice, in fact: He co-authored the World Health Organization’s definitive 1,500-page reference, Smallpox and its Eradication (known in public health as the Red Book), and in 2009 wrote a personal reminiscence of the global battle, Smallpox: The Death of a Disease. Just last month, he published a lengthy, closely argued essay in the journal he co-edits, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, urging the WHO to finally consent to destroying the last stocks of smallpox virus. (A decision the international agency declined to take; instead, for the sixth time in a row, it postponed a vote on destruction in favor of more study.) There are only a few people working in public health — not just in the United States, but in the world — who possess equivalent knowledge of smallpox, its eradication, and the persistent fears afterward that it could be used as a bioterror agent.

Last week, I talked to Henderson about the live-virus discovery and whether it will affect calls for all stocks of smallpox to be destroyed. He had some surprising things to say, particularly about the availability of smallpox vaccine. I edited our conversation for clarity and length.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, NIH, smallpox

Virus in Found Tubes of Smallpox Is Viable

July 11, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Variola, CDC

Variola, CDC

Here’s an update on the vials found on the National Institutes of Health campus last week that were labeled smallpox, and transported earlier this week to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The CDC and NIH have both confirmed that the virus in two of the tubes is viable.

That is, if the vials had broken, and someone had come in contact with the dried contents, the result could have been a smallpox infection — something that has not been seen in the world since 1978.

NIH director Dr. Francis Collins made the announcement in an email sent to staff today, which was shared with me. Simultaneously, CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden announced in a press briefing that the CDC lab studying the vials, which earlier had identified the contents as smallpox virus based on PCR of the contents’ DNA, had induced growth of the contents in a tissue culture, and confirmed that the growing material is smallpox virus.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, NIH, smallpox

Found: Forgotten Vials of Smallpox

July 8, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Variola, CDC

Variola, CDC

Headline-making news today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Workers clearing out an old storage room on the Bethesda, Md. campus of the National Institutes of Health have found a forgotten box of vials that contain smallpox.

Yes, smallpox. The “most terrible of all the ministers of death,” as Thomas Babington Macaulay called it in his 1848 History of England — a disease that was the world’s most dreadful killer, until it was declared eradicated in 1980. A disease caused by a virus that now is supposed to reside in only two highly secure laboratories on the planet, in Russia, and at the CDC.

Smallpox is the only human disease ever successfully eradicated — pursued to elimination by a relentless dragnet that closed nooses of vaccination around every identified case. After the last natural infection, in Somalia in 1977, the World Health Organization launched a second dragnet, scouring lab freezers and storage rooms for any remaining samples of the virus, and consolidating them in Siberia and Atlanta.

Somehow, these six tubes of freeze-dried virus evaded the search. They were found in the storage room of a lab that now belongs to the Food and Drug Administration but was ceded to that agency by NIH in 1972. They may date back to the 1950s.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, NIH, smallpox, Who

The "Road Not (Yet) Taken" On H7N9 Flu — And How Far We've Gotten

June 10, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Last week’s New England Journal of Medicine included a thoughtful meditation on the possibility that the new bird flu out of China, H7N9, could become a globe-spanning pandemic — and on how much knowledge is needed before we’ll be able to predict whether it will or not. The authors, all from the US National Institutes of Health, know a fair amount about pandemics: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s senior advisor and a medical historian; and Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, a physician and microbiologist who brought back to the world the viral cause of the worst pandemic: the influenza of 1918, which killed 100 million people.

In various combinations over the past 10 or so years, the three have written a number of papers looking back at the record fro 1918, interrogating its impact, and particularly examining the causes of its extraordinary death toll. So they are probably the perfect authors to write about gaps in knowledge about H7N9.

But aside from its useful examination of the virology, what struck me as most interesting about their paper is how soon it is to be able to write something like this. After all, H7N9 only emerged to public knowledge in late February, and so far has caused 132 cases and 37 deaths, all in eastern China. That these authors could write this paper now is yet another marker, I think, of how different this outbreak is from SARS 10 years ago, as well as how rapidly international public health science can move, if everyone cooperates.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: avian flu, China, flu, H7N9, influenza, NIH, Science Blogs

'We Have a Limited Window of Opportunity': CDC Warns of Resistance 'Nightmare'

March 6, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s not often that you get to hear a top federal health official deliberately deploy a headline-grabbing word such as “nightmare,” or warn: “We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm.”

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said both Tuesday, during a press conference announcing new CDC statistics on the advance of the highly drug-resistant bacteria known as CRE. His language — plus the fact that he conducted the entire press conference himself, instead of just making a brief opening statement — seem to me a clear signal that the CDC is taking this resistance problem seriously, and hoping we do too.

And we should. Here’s what the CDC announced Tuesday:

  • Healthcare institutions in 42 states have now identified at least one case of CRE.
  • The occurrence of this resistance in the overall family of bacteria has risen at least four-fold over 10 years.
  • In the CDC’s surveillance networks, 4.6 percent of hospitals and 17.8 percent of long-term care facilities diagnosed this bug in the first half of 2012.

Those are dire reports.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CDC, CRE, CRKP, KPC, NIH, Resistance, Science Blogs

The 'NIH Superbug': A New Case, And An Overlooked Resource

September 17, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

News, via the Washington Post‘s hard-working health reporter Brian Vastag: After 6 months with no cases, carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella has surfaced again at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, and has killed a boy from Minnesota who came to the specialty hospital after a bone-marrow transplant meant to address an immune deficiency. This sad event makes the boy the 19th patient to contract the extremely resistant hospital organism, and the 12th to die from it, since the outbreak began.

You can find here my last post analyzing this outbreak (which was originally reported by the Post following a write-up by NIH staff in the journal Science Translational Medicine). I’m looping back to the subject not just because of this new death, but also to add a few new publications to the discussion, one of them mine.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CRKP, Klebsiella, KPC, NIH, Resistance, SciAm, Science Blogs

The 'NIH Superbug': This Is Happening Every Day

August 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been away on assignment and have been trying to catch up to an onslaught of news. One of the things that broke while I was gone was a new paper in Science Translational Medicine describing the ferocious impact on a hospital at the National Institutes of Health of the arrival of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, known for short as KPC or CRKP.

Even though the news is now several days old — the paper went live at noon Wednesday and has been covered in most major media since — I think it’s worth doubling back to take a closer look. Because, with all respect to my media colleagues, I think some of this week’s stories have omitted the larger context. So, a different kind of post for me — less news, more analysis, based on this book, this magazine story, and these past posts on antibiotic resistance. Here we go:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CDC, CRKP, Klebsiella, KPC, NIH, Resistance, Science Blogs

Breaking: Panel Says To Cease Most Chimp Research

December 15, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There’s huge news today in biomedical research — a little outside my core topics, but so important that I thought it was worth highlighting for you anyway.

A report by the Institute of Medicine has declared that most research on chimps in the United States is unnecessary and should cease. Experiments should only continue if strict criteria are met:

  • If there is no other model or animal in which the research can be performed
  • If the research cannot be performed ethically on humans
  • If not using chimps will “prevent or significantly hinder advances necessary to prevent or treat life-threatening or debilitating conditions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, anthropology, Biology, NIH, primates, Science Blogs

How Much Is a Drug-Resistance Death Worth? Less Than $600

July 5, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So, antibiotic resistance: We care about it, right? The World Health Organization does: It made antimicrobial resistance the theme of this year’s World Health Day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does. The journal Lancet Infectious Diseases says it’s a “global health concern.” The major association for infectious disease physicians has pleaded for attention. Two separate sets of legislators have introduced two bills in Congress.

You’d think, with all those calls for attention, that combating antibiotic resistance would be a priority in the United States. But if we can take how much we spend to research a problem as a gauge of how much we care about it, then antibiotic resistance is no priority at all.

As in: For every death from AIDS, the US federal research establishment awards approximately $69,000 in grant funds. And for every death from MRSA, it awards $570.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, C.diff, Funding, MRSA, NIH, Resistance, Science Blogs

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