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

Farm-Drug Companies Agree to Antibiotics Ban. More of the Same, or Fresh Start?

March 28, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

USDA Photos by Lance Cheung/Flickr

Big news in the realm of agricultural antibiotics: For the first time in almost 37 years of trying, the US Food and Drug Administration has achieved some control over the meat-industry practice of routinely giving antibiotics to livestock. The drawback: The control comes in the form of a voluntary commitment by veterinary drug manufacturers — and while the FDA maintains the voluntary program will work, there is widespread skepticism that the agency may be optimistic.

Here is what has happened; it takes a few steps to lay out. The FDA has been putting this voluntary program together for several years now, via two “Guidances” (numbered 209 and 213), which are nonbinding agency recommendations without the legal force of regulations, plus a Directive, which fills in the details. The three documents set forth what the agency wants to see happen: for meat production to stop using the routine micro-doses (“growth promoters” or “subtherapeutic antibiotics”) that fatten animals, but create antibiotic resistance; for farmers to stop administering antibiotics to entire herds or flocks via their feed and water; and for antibiotics to be used on farms only with the oversight of a licensed veterinarian. They accomplish that by asking veterinary antibiotics manufacturers to change the labeling on the drugs, so that they can no longer legally be sold over-the-counter to be used for growth promotion. The first Guidance, 209, was made final a year ago, and sets out the rationale for making this change. The second, 213, was made final last December; at that time, the FDA gave veterinary drug manufacturers  three months to say whether they were going to comply.

Which brings us to the new news: On Wednesday afternoon, the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine published the list of veterinary drug manufacturers who have agreed to comply with the voluntary label change. Out of 26 manufacturers in that market, 25 agreed to cooperate. The FDA says this represents “99.6 percent of the applications,” that is, drugs and the ways they are administered.

So: Is the long battle over growth-promoter antibiotics, banned in Europe for 8 years now, over just like that? Or is there more to do?

[Read more…]

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

Serious Resistant Infections Increasingly Found in Children

March 24, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: Ishai Parasol/Flickr

Photo: Ishai Parasol/Flickr

Here’s some disturbing news published late last week in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society by a team of researchers from two Chicago medical institutions plus an expert analyst of antibiotic resistance: Serious drug-resistant infections in children are rising across the United States. While the rate of their occurrence remains low overall, they nonetheless increased two- to three-fold over 10 years.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: E. coli, Science Blogs

CDC: Some Hospitals Need Assistance Using Antibiotics Properly (And the New Federal Budget May Help)

March 4, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Zach Bulick/Flickr

Image: Zach Bulick/Flickr

Double-barreled news today from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In an analysis of several sets of hospital data, gathered by the agency and also purchased from independent databases, the CDC said it found that more than 37 percent of prescriptions written in hospitals involved some sort of error or poor practice, increasing the risk of serious infections or antibiotic resistance. And in a surprise announcement timed to the release of the federal draft budget, the agency said it is in line to receive $30 million to enhance its work combating antibiotic resistance in the US.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, C.diff, CDC, Resistance, Science Blogs, stewardship

Fecal Transplants: Treat Them Like Tissue, Not Like Drugs

February 23, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Messtiza (CC), Flickr

Messtiza (CC), Flickr

It’s been a little more than a year since the first-ever clinical trial of fecal transplants — the practice of infusing diluted donor stool into the colon of someone suffering from Clostridium difficile infection — demonstrated that the low-tech process not only works to overcome the disease’s painful, life-disrupting diarrhea, but works better than the standard treatment of antibiotics.

That finding confirmed what gastroenterologists had known for a while — not to mention what patients who had sought out the procedure, in the United States or in other countries, could confirm from their own experience of being rapidly and, for the most part, permanently cured.

Despite that result, and despite significant pent-up demand from patients and physicians both, fecal transplants’ status in US medicine has barely budged in the ensuing year. The procedure is caught in a bind at the Food and Drug Administration, which has struggled to define under which of its regulatory authorities the transplants fall. Last May, the agency proposed forcing physicians who wanted to perform the procedure — many of whom were already doing so — to obtain a cumbersome Investigational New Drug application beforehand. After an outcry, the agency backed off, but many practitioners had been spooked, and many patients (judging by my email at least) returned to seeking out the procedure in a semi-underground manner.

In Nature last week, a team of researchers (including gastroenterologist Colleen Kelly, MD, who heads a US clinical trial that is still underway) argued for a way out of the paralysis. They propose that the FDA evaluate stool infusions not under the rules for drugs, with all the clinical trial requirements that implies, but rather under the rules for tissues such as blood, cartilage, skin and bone.

[Read more…]

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

From Bird Flu to Big Farms: The Rise of China's Agriculture

February 21, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Willem vdh/Flickr

Image: Willem vdh/Flickr

In my last post, I talked about the unnerving increase in avian flu H7N9 in China. The novel flu strain, now in its second year, appears to be spreading more rapidly than it did in its first appearance, and also more rapidly than H5N1, the avian flu strain that has caused the most worry internationally.

You can’t have avian flu — or at least, not this avian flu — without birds; most of the people who have been diagnosed with H7N9 had contact with live chickens or visited a market that sold live poultry for slaughter. H7N9 is continuing to spread in China; and so it’s a lucky coincidence that a nonprofit with deep knowledge of Chinese agriculture has just published a series of reports exploring the vast expansion of Chinese production of meat animals, including chickens.

[Read more…]

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

H7N9 Flu, Year Two: What Is Going On?

February 10, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Live-poultry market, Shandong, China, 2009. Jonas_in-China (CC), Flickr

Live-poultry market, Shandong, China, 2009. Jonas_in-China, Flickr

Cast your mind back to about this time a year ago. A novel strain of flu, influenza A (H7N9), had emerged in China, in the provinces around Shanghai. International health authorities were deeply concerned, because any new strain of flu bears careful watching — and also because, on the 10th anniversary of the SARS epidemic, no one knew how candid China would be about its cases.

By the time peak season for flu ended in China, there had been 132 cases and 37 deaths from that newest flu strain. But, confounding expectations, the Chinese government was notably open about the new disease’s occurrence, and scientists worldwide were able to ramp up to study it. Still, no one could say whether that flu would be the one to make the always-feared leap to a pandemic strain that might sweep the globe. As with other, earlier, worrisome strains of flu, science could only wait and see whether it might return.

And now it has.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: avian flu, CDC, chicken, China, flu, H5N1, H7N9, influenza, poultry, Science Blogs, Who

Report: FDA Documents Show Decade of Unsuccessful Attempts to Control Farm Antibiotics

January 28, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: gina pina/Flickr

Image: gina pina/Flickr

A nonprofit group that has been using the courts to pressure the Food and Drug Administration into exerting more control over farm antibiotic overuse has done a deep review of FDA documents prised loose through Freedom of Information Act requests — and concludes that by allowing the drugs to remain on the market as formulated, the agency isn’t meeting its own internal safety standards.

Instead of only making that assertion, the Natural Resources Defense Council took the unusual step of showing its evidence in detail. NRDC published its analysis, Playing Chicken with Antibiotics, alongside a selection of the raw documents it received from the FDA. You’ll have to be a document-obsessive to take it on: The file (cached in a Dropbox and requiring download to view) is 306 mb and 971 pages. But even without considering its content, the file’s heft makes clear how much discussion there has been at the FDA over this issue, and suggests how much evidence has been accumulating over the problem of antibiotic resistance emerging from livestock production. Also telling: The FDA has been attempting to put some controls on livestock production since 1977; these documents cover only reviews of antibiotic feed additives that were conducted between 2001 and 2010.

NRDC’s conclusion, in its report:

FDA’s scientific reviewers’ findings show that none of these products would likely be approvable as new additives for nontherapeutic livestock use if submitted today, under current FDA guidelines. Eighteen of the 30 reviewed feed additives were deemed to pose a “high risk” of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food supply, based on the information available. The remainder lacked adequate data for the reviewers to make any determination and their safety remains unproven. In addition, FDA concluded in their review that at least 26 of the reviewed feed additives do not satisfy even the safety standards set by FDA in 1973.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, FDA, food policy, food safety, growth promoters, NRDC, Resistance, Science Blogs

Almost Three Times the Risk of Carrying MRSA from Living Near a Mega-Farm

January 22, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Pig farms from the air. Image: Maryn McKenna

Pig farms from the air. Image: Maryn McKenna

In the long fight over antibiotic use in agriculture, one of the most contentious points is whether the resistant bacteria that inevitably arise can move off the farm to affect humans. Most of the illnesses that have been associated with farm antibiotic use — resistant foodborne illness, for example — occur so far from farms that opponents of antibiotic control find them easy to dismiss. So whenever a research team can link resistant bacteria found in humans with farms that are close to those humans, it is an important contribution to the debate.

A team from the University of Iowa, Iowa City Veterans Affairs, and Kent State University have done just that. In next month’s Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, they survey 1,036 VA patients who lived in rural Iowa and were admitted to the Iowa City facility in 2010 and 2011. Overall, among those patients, 6.8 percent were carrying MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in their nostrils. But the patients’ likelihood of carrying MRSA was 2.76 times higher if they lived within one mile of a farm housing 2,500 or more pigs.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, colonization, food policy, hogs, MRSA, Science Blogs, ST398

Former New York Times Editor, Wife Publicly Tag-Team Criticism of Cancer Patient. Ugh.

January 13, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image; Rebecca Barray (CC), Flickr

Back in 2011, I was researching a story about the under-appreciated toll of foodborne illness. Through social media, I met Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mom of three in Connecticut who had suffered an extended, bad bout with antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter. She was a great interview — thoughtful, funny, frank — and she had an extraordinary story: She was a survivor of breast cancer and aggressive treatment for it — double mastectomy, preventative removal of her ovaries and chemotherapy — but, she said candidly, foodborne illness had made her sicker than her cancer treatment ever did.

After confirming her story via physicians and factcheckers, I used it as the opening of a long investigative piece that was published in June 2012. After that, we stayed in touch on Facebook and Twitter, and I watched as her already substantial following expanded, responding to that same forthright voice that I had found so compelling. Within a few months, though, her fortunes changed — and subsequently, so did her online circle. In October 2012, Adams learned that her cancer had returned and metastasized elsewhere in her body. It was judged Stage IV, incurable. She wrote:

I am at the beginning of what treatments are available for me.

Don’t you count me out yet. Far from it.

Just because this disease can’t be cured doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of life left in me; there is still so much for me to do.

In the 2 years since, I’ve watched in admiration as Adams has spoken directly and realistically about her treatments, family relationships, symptoms, hopes and fears. She is uniquely not a treat-at-all-costs cancer warrior, not a Pinktober booster, not a believer in miracle cures. Carefully and patiently, even when in pain (she has been in the hospital since Christmas for pain management), she commiserates with other patients and their families, urges people via her #mondaypleads hashtag to get regular checkups, and starts every day on Twitter with this mantra: “Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.”

So you’ll understand why I, and numerous other bloggers and tweeters, object to two first-person essays about Adams, published over the past few days by a New York Times editor and his wife, and consider them gratuitous, mean-spirited attacks. (A sample of reaction: Xeni Jardin, on Twitter (Storified); Megan Garber, The Atlantic; Greg Mitchell, The Nation; Cecily Kellogg, Babble; Adam Weinstein on Gawker.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: cancer, personal, Science Blogs

Can Antibiotics User Fees Force Down Drug Mis-Use and Overuse?

January 7, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: NeilT (CC), Flickr

Happy new year, constant readers. Here’s the most urgent thing I have to say today: Stop reading and go set your DVRs for 8pm ET tonight. The fantastic The Poisoner’s Handbook, written by Wired colleague and dear friend Deborah Blum, has been adapted by PBS and airs tonight on The American Experience. It’s going to be superb.

Back? OK, on to business. Just before the holidays, the Food and Drug Administration finalized its long-aborning plan to ask the meat-production industry to reduce its use of routinely administered antibiotics. (My posts on the move here and here.) The FDA’s guidance to industry, as it is called, is not a regulation but rather a request for voluntary action on the part of veterinary-drug companies. It has met with skepticism and concerns that manufacturers will redefine the uses of their drugs in such a way that nothing will change.

The FDA action is aimed at the routine use of antibiotics for what is called growth promotion — causing animals to gain muscle faster than they would without the drugs being used — and is modeled on a ban on growth promoters enacted by the European Union in 2005. The goal, as in the EU, is to reduce the drugs’ use, and therefore the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that use stimulates.

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine, University of Calgary economist Aidan Hollis suggests though that a ban may not be the most useful or practical approach to the problem of drug overuse. In its place, he suggests the pocketbook persuasion of having to pay a fee.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, drug development, FDA, IDSA, Resistance, Science Blogs, stewardship

Re-Examining the FDA Antibiotics Decision: Banning Growth Promoters Won't Be Enough

December 27, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

USDA Photos by Lance Cheung/Flickr

In my first take on the news of the FDA finalizing its request to agriculture to stop using growth-promoter antibiotics, I promised to come back for a more thoughtful reaction. And then this happened, and this happened, and the holidays happened, and, well, it’s been a busy few weeks.

So, finally getting back to it: When the news broke, a number of people, including me, said that this was a long-awaited first step on the part of the FDA, but of uncertain ultimate impact because it asks for voluntary action and does not address whether the drugs simply can be relabeled. I still agree with both those points, but think the possibly most important issue — which I raised briefly in the first post  — is that merely removing antibiotics, without changing the system in which those antibiotics have been administered, may cause significant animal-welfare problems, without having any real effect on human health.

(If you’d like the short version of this, listen to my chat with NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, food safety, growth promoters, Resistance, Science Blogs

Drug-Resistant Bacteria on Chicken: It's Everywhere and the Government Can't Help

December 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Thousand Robots (CC), Flickr

Two important, linked publications are out today, both carrying the same message: The way we raise poultry in this country is creating an under-appreciated health hazard, and the government structures we depend upon to detect that hazard and protect us from it are failing us.

The two pubs are:

  • A long piece that will be in the Feb. 2014 edition of Consumer Reports but has been placed online today.
  • A companion report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, addressing some of the systemic problems raised by the Consumer Reports story.

Short version: Independent tests show that multi-drug resistant disease-causing bacteria are widely present on chicken, and the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has insufficient personnel, or legal authority, to change that.

Both these assertions are important, because foodborne illness, and especially drug-resistant foodborne illness, are also under-appreciated — for how serious the disease can be, and how long-lasting the after-effects are. (For more on those: Here’s a piece I wrote for The Atlantic about how drug-resistant bacteria on chicken are causing an epidemic of urinary tract infections, and one for Scientific American about the lifelong cost of foodborne illness.)

It’s worth emphasizing also that we are right now in the middle of an outbreak of Salmonella on chicken that has been going on for about a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted an update just this morning: 416 people since since last February, in 23 states and Puerto Rico, 39 percent of them hospitalized, linked to a single producer’s brand of chicken.

[Read more…]

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

FDA Scrutinizes Antibacterial Products for Hormonal Disruption, Bacterial Resistance

December 16, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Jim Belford (CC), Flickr

More news today out of the Food and Drug Administration — so while I’m still writing my follow-up to last week’s news on growth promoters, I want to toss this up first. The latest: The FDA has announced that it is formally reconsidering “antibacterial” soaps and other personal-care products, charging that the antibacterial ingredients confer no benefit over regular soap and water while carrying extra risks.

In a draft rule that will be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the agency calls for manufacturers of consumer antibacterial products to begin providing data that shows the ingredients are both safe for daily use, and also more effective than plain soap and water. Deep in the 137-page rule, it also raises the issue that’s most interesting to me: whether the routine use of these products causes bacteria to develop resistance against the active ingredients, and against antibiotics as an unintended side effect.

Antibacterial products are a vast market; according to the FDA there are more than 2,000 currently for sale to consumers. (NB: This rule does not cover antibacterial hand-sanitizers; neither does it include the kind of washes and wipes used in healthcare.) The announcement today opens a 6-month comment period that ends next June. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

[Read more…]

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

FDA Finally Imposes Some Controls on Agricultural Antibiotics. Sort Of.

December 11, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

USDA Photos by Lance Cheung/Flickr

This morning, the US Food and Drug Administration dropped some long-awaited-but-still-big news regarding the use of antibiotics in meat production. Tl;dr: The FDA asked (but did not compel) the livestock industry to stop using the micro-dose “growth promoter” antibiotics that are widely believed to contribute to increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals, food and humans.

With exquisite timing, they happen to have picked a day when I am traveling, in order to get to my end-of-semester evaluation tomorrow for my  MIT fellowship. So I’m going to do what curation I can on this, and point to some important reactions and analyses. I’ll come back for a deeper look, probably on the weekend.

So here are the basics.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, FDA, food policy, food safety, growth promoters, Resistance, Science Blogs

Measles Cases Triple in U.S., Vaccine Refusal Here and Elsewhere to Blame

December 6, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: Teseum (CC), Flickr

Measles, one of the most communicable of all infectious diseases, is spiking in the United States, with three times as many cases as usual this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The spike is due to both foreign importations — infected travelers coming from places where measles is not under control — and local vulnerability: unvaccinated children and adults in the United States.

In a press briefing, the CDC’s director Dr. Thomas Frieden said that from January to November, there were 175 known cases of measles in the US, with 20 of those people having to be hospitalized. The agency would expect to see about 60 cases, he said. Those cases came from 52 separate travelers. Most of the time, the imported virus found only a few people to infect — but nine times, the imports caused large outbreaks, always in people who had not received the vaccine.

“It is not a failure of the vaccine,” Frieden said. “It’s a failure to vaccinate. Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, measles, Science Blogs, vaccination

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

When We Lose Antibiotics, Here's Everything Else We'll Lose Too

November 20, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A colony of an Actinomycetes bacteria taken at 140x magnification.Image courtesy Biology101.org/Flickr

This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation — the only place I’ve ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it — has experienced its first case, and first death, from  a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria. From the New Zealand Herald:

In January, while he was teaching English in Vietnam, (Brian) Pool suffered a brain hemorrhage and was operated on in a Vietnamese hospital.

He was flown to Wellington Hospital where tests found he was carrying the strain of bacterium known as KPC-Oxa 48 – an organism that rejects every kind of antibiotic.

Wellington Hospital clinical microbiologist Mark Jones (said): “Nothing would touch it. Absolutely nothing. It’s the first one that we’ve ever seen that is resistant to every single antibiotic known.”

Pool’s death is an appalling tragedy. But it is also a lesson, twice over: It illustrates that antibiotic resistance can spread anywhere, no matter the defenses we put up — and it demonstrates that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history. Jones, the doctor who treated Pool, says in the story linked above: “This man was in the post-antibiotic era.”

[Read more…]

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

Antibiotic Overuse on Farms: Is the Opinion Tide Turning?

November 4, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

USDA Photos by Lance Cheung/Flickr

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Casa Superbug — including some conference appearances, more on them later — so the first thing I’d like to do is point out some things that appeared while I was offline. Notably: In editorials, three newspapers recently challenged the way antibiotics are used on farms and asked why we can’t do better.

[Read more…]

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

Science online and Science Online: A (Possible) Way Forward

October 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Doctorow (CC), Flickr

I mean this post to address the convulsions in the science-writing community that arose this past week in the wake of the problems faced by writer Danielle N. Lee, PhD regarding her Scientific American blog. That situation was resolved to good effect and quickly; if you’d like to catch up on that, the posts are here and here.

(Constant Readers, bear with me. I’ll get back to scary diseases and food policy next week.)

As most in that professional community know, but other readers and members of my other networks may not, Lee’s experience inadvertently triggered a cascade of revelations in which Bora Zivkovic, the blogs editor at SciAm and a very powerful and outspoken gatekeeper in science writing, was accused of sexual harassment by an aspiring writer. (Not Lee.) Over several days, additional accusations with and without names attached tumbled around the blogosphere and Twitterverse until, on Friday, one of his bloggers — the third woman to come forward by name — published a searing account of her experience which included quotes from sexually explicit emails he had written. Within hours, he resigned from his SciAm post. (The best wrap-up is Laura Helmuth’s at Slate.)

As a SciAm columnist and contributing editor, I am grateful that Zivkovic has been separated from the magazine and institution. But I think it is important to emphasize how wide the impact of his bad behavior has been. So I want to address the continuing ripples in the community, especially surrounding the forthcoming beloved and very hot-ticket conference, Science Online, which he helped create.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: personal, SciAm, Science Blogs

CDC Director: In the Shutdown, 'We Are Juggling Chainsaws'

October 16, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The CDC’s Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta, from which it monitors disease outbreaks around the world.
Left: Currently. Right: Before the shutdown began.

We’re now on the sixteenth day of the federal shutdown. As I write, the Senate has announced a deal to avoid a debt default and open the government. It remains to be seen whether that will work, or how fast. Yesterday, on Day 15, I had a long conversation with Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about what this shutdown has meant for his agency, its employees, and the health of Americans, and the world. I have lightly edited the conversation for clarity.

Maryn McKenna, WIRED: You’re on Day 15 of sending home 68 percent of your 13,000-person staff, in Atlanta and around the world. How is the CDC coping?

Thomas R. Frieden, CDC: Every day this goes on, it gets harder to manage. We’re used to juggling things at CDC, but this is like juggling chain saws.

We’ve got two-thirds of our staff out. The exempt staff, the ones who are here, are here just because of a happenstance of how they’re paid: They are people who are on multi-year money, or grant money, or people in the Commissioned Corps, the uniformed Public Health Service. Of the people who are furloughable, 95 percent are furloughed.

I walk through the offices and talk to the remaining staff to thank them for being here. A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, “We have no idea what we’re missing right now.” For years people have asked me, ‘Do you sleep well, knowing all these terrible threats we face?” And I’ve always said, “I sleep great because I know we have fantastic staff on watch.” And now I’m not sleeping.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, EIS, Science Blogs, Shutdown

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 21
  • Next Page »

© [fl_year} Maryn McKenna | Web Design Services by Sumy Designs, LLC

Facebook