Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Get Your Shots, Wash Your Hands, Thanks, and Goodbye

March 27, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

icenine-exit

IceNine (CC), on Flickr

A little less than 5 years ago, editor Betsy Mason of WIRED Science called to ask whether I’d be interested in joining a new thing. WIRED was thinking about starting a science blog platform; she wondered whether I’d want to be one of the bloggers.

I did very much want: WIRED is both a great magazine, with inspiring storytelling and innovative design, and a brand with international reach. I was a bit perplexed why they would want me — scary diseases didn’t seem like a core interest for WIRED readers — but Betsy (now one of the authors of WIRED’s Map Lab blog) was confident the audience was there.

She was right. Superbug debuted Sept. 14, 2010 with a report on the “Indian superbug,” the antibiotic resistance factor NDM that was then just starting to move across the world. My second post explored “livestock MRSA,” the bacterium that originates in antibiotic overuse in agriculture, and the third looked at the shivery subject of a rare and deadly parasite transmitted by organ transplants. Those three posts pretty much defined Superbug’s turf: public health, global health, and food policy, with a sprinkle of dread. Readers responded with fascination and good will, then and to the more than 300 posts afterward.

Of which, as you’ve probably guessed, this is the last. Superbug has had a fantastic run, but there was only one other place I wanted to work, and I’m headed there. Next week, I’ll be joining National Geographic’s Phenomena under a new blog name.

(Worth saying: This move is coincident with Wired.com’s redesign, but is not at all related. Phenomena happened to have a rare opening.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, Ebola, food policy, Lyme, Never Seconds, polio, Resistance, TB

Your McNuggets: Soon Without a Side of Antibiotics

March 4, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Fast-food giant McDonald’s announced today that it will cease buying chicken raised with the routine use of most antibiotics, a move that seems certain to reframe the contentious debate about agriculture’s use of the increasingly precious drugs. The company set a deadline of two years to make chicken in its 14,000 US locations substantially antibiotic-free.

The announcement instantly makes McDonald’s the largest company by far to use its buying power to change how livestock are raised. Its 25 million US customers a day dwarf those at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which pioneered fast food using antibiotic-free meat, and also at Chick-fil-A, which announced a year ago that it would move to antibiotic-free chicken in five years.

McDonald’s new policy doesn’t solve the farm-antibiotics problem. The company is making the move only for chicken, not for beef or pork (though chicken is already the meat Americans eat the most). And the policy has important caveats. But since McDonald’s is the largest food-service buyer of chicken in America, this can’t help but affect other restaurants, and production of other meats.

In a phone interview, Marion Gross, senior vice president of McDonald’s North America Supply Chain, said the company made the move because customers have been asking for it. “This about meaningful action that is important to our customers,” she said. “We’re happy to be able to achieve this. This is not something new; we had our first antibiotic policy in place back in 2003, so it’s the evolution of a journey we have been on for some time.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, mcdonalds, Resistance

Resistance: The Movie That Will Make You Care About Antibiotic Misuse

February 24, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A few years ago I happened to get introduced to a pair of filmmakers, Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, who were starting to explore the topic of antibiotic resistance. They had the same questions about resistance that I obsess over, and the same shock about how enormous the problem is: according to a recent estimate, 700,000 deaths every year, likely to rise into the millions if nothing is done.

They recognized their disbelief as the creative spark for a project, and three years later, have brought out Resistance, a documentary now available on iTunes. LV Anderson just said about it, in Slate:

Regardless of your preexisting interest in public health or food politics, once you learn a little about antibiotic abuse, you won’t be able to stop caring about it. Without antibiotics, many of the medical treatments that we take for granted would be impossible, and the speed and carelessness with which we squander these important drugs — on people who don’t need them and on livestock that really don’t need them — is downright infuriating…  In talking-head interviews with well-chosen, highly articulate experts, Resistance explains the fundamental reason the incorrect use of antibiotics is so dangerous: Every time we use antibiotics, we give bacteria another chance to develop resistance to it.

I think Resistance is a fantastic exploration of the problem, but I am likely to be biased, because I am in it. But I realized as I watched it that there was a lot about the documentary that I didn’t know: how it came to be, why the stories within it were chosen, and whether making it changed the filmmakers’ life.

Here’s an edited chat with Michael Graziano about making the film.

Maryn McKenna: Your previous film, Lunch Line, was about school lunch and nutrition. Antibiotic resistance seems a long way from that. What got you interested?

Michael Graziano: I was hoping to get rich as quickly as possible. I calculated that if I spent three years making a film about science and public health the money would start pouring in.

Turns out my calculations were wrong.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, documentary, Resistance

How to Fight Superbugs: Start Spending Money

February 5, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory.

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory. Center for Disease Control/AP


The government-chartered British project examining antibiotic resistance — which made such a splash in December with its prediction that untreatable resistance will kill 10 million people per year by 2050 — has produced its first set of recommendations for turning back the problem.

They come down to this: Start spending money.

The project — formally titled the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance — analyzes the funding spent directly on resistance research, and indirectly through training specialists and investing in innovation, and finds that the resources devoted by governments and the private sector are not up to the job. With the same bluntness that marked its first report, the project says: “There is a problem of chronic under-investment in both the financial and human capital needed to tackle antimicrobial resistance.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, Resistance

The White House 2016 Budget Includes Big Funding for Antibiotic Resistance

January 31, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

Next week, President Barack Obama will unveil his full budget request for the coming fiscal year. When he does, he’ll also reveal details of how his administration plans to fund the national strategy for combating antibiotic resistance that the White House released last autumn.

Here’s what we know so far, based on a fact sheet that the White House released earlier this week:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, budget, Resistance, White House

The Coming Cost of Superbugs: 10 Million Deaths Per Year

December 15, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory.

Plates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in CDC’s healthcare-associated infections laboratory. Center for Disease Control/AP

If you weren’t taking antibiotic resistance seriously before, now would be a good time to start.

A project commissioned by the British government has released estimates of the near-future global toll of antibiotic resistance that are jaw-dropping in their seriousness and scale: 10 millions deaths per year, more than cancer, and at least $100 trillion in sacrificed gross national product.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, Resistance

To Slow Down Drug Resistance in Health Care, Buy an Antibiotic-Free Turkey for Thanksgiving

November 19, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Organic turkey poults, Lance Cheung, USDA. CC on Flickr

Organic turkey poults, Lance Cheung, USDA. USDA/Flickr

I thought it might be time to switch away from Ebola and catch up with other disease problems that continue to occur in the world. (If you miss Ebolanoia, though, I’m still collecting instances at my Tumblr. The latest: Indian authorities have force-quarantined in an airport a man who returned from West Africa with a clean bill of health and negative blood tests. They say they will not allow him to leave until his semen tests negative for Ebolavirus. Yes, they are insisting on samples.)

So: How can healthcare workers contribute to slowing down antibiotic resistance? A healthcare nonprofit suggests they commit to buying an antibiotic-free turkey for Thanksgiving.

If it feels like the problem in one sphere, medicine, doesn’t have much to do with the other, agriculture, then you are the perfect target for this pledge. (Even if you don’t actually work in health care.)

Here’s the backdrop to the campaign, created by Health Care Without Harm,the Sharing Antimicrobial Reports for Pediatric Stewardship (SHARPS) collaborative, and the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society (PIDS):

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, ECDC, Resistance, Thanksgiving, Turkey

White House Actions on Antibiotic Resistance: Big Steps, Plus Disappointments

September 22, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

Roman Boed (CC), Flickr

The United States government proposed several important steps last week that, if accomplished, will significantly change how this country attempts to counter the advance of antibiotic resistance, bringing us within reach of the more complete programs which exist in Europe. But as significant as it is, the new program has some perplexing gaps that left experts attending to the issue disappointed.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, Resistance, White House

Chicken Company Perdue Takes Big Steps to Reduce Antibiotic Use

September 3, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Karen Jackson (CC), Flickr

Karen Jackson (CC), Flickr

Big news in the world of food policy, farming and antibiotic use: Perdue Farms, the third-largest chicken producer in the United States, announced today that during the past decade it has ceased using most of the antibiotics that formerly propped up its chicken production.

There are caveats to that “most,” and I’ll explain them. But it’s important to say up front that this is a nationally significant move and looks like an industry-leading step.

[Read more…]

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

How Agriculture's Growth Promoters Might Work: A Mouse Study Sheds Some Light

August 19, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Rama (CC), FLickr

Rama (CC), Flickr

The farm practice that underlies most agricultural use of antibiotics is known as “growth promotion”: It calls for giving very small doses of antibiotics routinely to meat animals because those doses cause them to gain fat and muscle more quickly than they would otherwise. Growth promotion dates back to the early days of the antibiotic era, and has always been somewhat mysterious. Though there were attempts to pick apart its mechanisms in the 1950s and 1960s (I’ve been reading some fascinating old accounts), for the most part, people simply accepted that it worked. It’s only in the past decade or so, as interest has increased in the microbes that reside everywhere in our and animals’ bodies (a vast community generally known as the microbiome), that researchers have begun trying to dissect what is going on.

The scientific team that has probably pursued this most intensely is the NYU Langone Medical Center lab led by Martin J. Blaser. Blaser published a popular account of their research into antibiotics’ effect on obesity, asthma, diabetes, and other disorders in Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, published in April. (Disclosure: I reviewed the book for Nature.) Two years ago, the team showed that giving small doses of antibiotics to very young mice affected genes controlling metabolism of nutrients, and caused the mice to gain weight. Now they have followed up that research with detailed work exploring how much the timing and length of antibiotics affects weight gain. Though the work is still in mice, it leads to provocative conclusions about how growth promoters work in livestock, and what early-life antibiotics might do to humans as well.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, growth promoters, microbiome, Resistance

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