Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Follow-up: On Clarity, Dignity, Apologies and Moving Forward

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image: Snigl3t (CC), Flickr

This is a follow-up to my post over the weekend on the #StandingwithDNLee situation that enveloped Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D., her blog at Scientific American, SciAm’s partner organizations, and — by extension — the many thousands of people who expressed support for her. While the situation is sure to have a long tail, some significant things happened Sunday and Monday, so I want to update and note those to close the loop. (If this story is new to you, have a look at my last post.)

In chronological order:

  • Scientific American posted an explanation (though not, publicly, an apology), alleging that legal concerns caused Dr. Lee’s post  — exploring her reaction to verbal abuse by an editor at an organization which SciAm listed as a partner — to be taken down within an hour of its being published.
  • Biology-Online.org, whose blog editor verbally abused Dr. Lee in the process of asking her to work for free, announced that that editor had been fired, and unreservedly apologized to Dr. Lee.
  • Dr. Lee’s post at Scientific American was restored with an editor’s note.

If that’s what you needed to catch up, that’s the news in a nutshell. Out of many, many blog reactions (some curated here by Liz Ditz; 13,600 indexed by Google), I recommend these posts by Kate Clancy, Dr. Isis, Janet Stemwedel, Melanie Tannenbaum and Daniel Lende. If on the other hand you think all this coverage was more than the situation warranted, you might prefer Scott Huler’s post.

That’s the quick round-up. More details and some final thoughts to follow. [Read more…]

On Science, Communication, Respect, and Coming Back from Mistakes

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image: Marc Falardeau, (CC), Flickr

A couple of unpleasant and deeply dismaying things have happened in the science blogosphere in the past 36 hours or so. I’m posting on it, along with a growing number of other science bloggers, in order to stand in solidarity with a fellow blogger and to ensure her voice is not silenced. (If you’d like to catch up to the full story, try the Twitter hashtag #standingwithdnlee, or read this search string here. It will take a while.)

Disclosure up front: This situation involves the blog network of the magazine Scientific American, where I am a columnist and contributing editor (which is magazine jargon indicating, more or less, that they pay me a set amount of money for a certain number of columns per year). I respect the Scientific American name and feel as privileged to be associated it as I do to be here at Wired — but in this case I think the magazine has made a mistake, and I hope they reverse course.

That said, here’s what’s going on.

(This post has been updated — read to the end — and a follow-up appears here.)

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Shutdown Salmonella Outbreak Continues. CDC Food Safety Chief: 'We Have a Blind Spot.'

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Image: Ben Husmann, (CC), Flickr

We’re 11 days now into the federal shutdown and four days since the announcement of a major foodborne outbreak in chicken that is challenging the shutdown-limited abilities of the food-safety and disease-detective personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture. Here’s an update.
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There's a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government's Shut Down

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image: BokChoi-Snowpea (CC), Flickr

Late-breaking news, and I’ll update as I find out more: While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278 illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.

“FSIS is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific production period,” the agency said in an emailed alert. “The outbreak is continuing.”

(Updates to this post are at the bottom.)

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A Few Ways the Government Shutdown Could Harm Your Health (And the World's)

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image: BMills (CC), Flickr

There’s going to be a lot — a lot — of coverage today on the federal shutdown, what it means and how long it might go on. I thought it might be worth quickly highlighting how it affects the parts of the government that readers here care most about: public health, global health, food safety and the spread of scary diseases.

Most of those government functions are contained within the Cabinet-level Department of Health and Human Services, where 52 percent of the employees have been sent home. So the news is not good.

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CDC Threat Report: Yes, Agricultural Antibiotics Play a Role in Drug Resistance

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Campylobacter bacteria. Image: CDC

The grave assessment on the advance of drug resistance, released Monday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contained some important observations about the relationship between antibiotic use in agriculture and resistant infections in humans. Those observations, combined with remarks made yesterday by the director of the CDC and also with testimony given in the past by other CDC personnel, ought to put to rest what seems like a persistent meme: that the CDC has never said, or doesn’t believe, that agricultural antibiotic use plays a role in the advance of resistance.

This is important because it puts the CDC in line with a substantial body of research pointing to agricultural use playing a role in the emergence of resistance outside farm properties. With the CDC agreeing — plus, to some degree, the Food and Drug Administration — surely it’s time to move on to whether there are things that could be done to curb the risks posed by some ag practices, while respecting the role that livestock-raising in particular plays as a substantial economic sector, and as an engine in feeding the world.

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CDC Threat Report: 'We Will Soon Be in a Post-Antibiotic Era'

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Image: CDC

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just published a first-of-its-kind assessment of the threat the country faces from antibiotic-resistant organisms, ranking them by the number of illnesses and deaths they cause each year and outlining urgent steps that need to be taken to roll back the trend.

The agency’s overall — and, it stressed, conservative — assessment of the problem:

  • Each year, in the U.S., 2,049,442 illnesses caused by bacteria and fungi that are resistant to at least some classes of antibiotics;
  • Each year, out of those illnesses, 23,000 deaths;
  • Because of those illnesses and deaths, $20 billion each year in additional healthcare spending;
  • And beyond the direct healthcare costs, an additional $35 billion lost to society in foregone productivity.

“If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC’s director, said in a media briefing. “And for some patients and for some microbes, we are already there.”

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Chipotle + Willy Wonka + Fiona Apple: Whimsy and a Better Food World

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source: snipped from a Chipotle Mexican Grill ad campaign

For the second time, the marketing crews at Chipotle have produced an ad that combines off-beat animation, an alternative-ish singer, and aspirations for a better food system into an educational, emotional message piece (which, to be fair, also sells burritos).

The short film (at 3:23, it’s too long to be called an ad) was released Thursday afternoon. Unlike Chipotle’s first foray into animation two years ago — which featured Coldplay, the voice of Willie Nelson, and a small farmer who sells out to agribusiness but then buys his farm back and starts again — this little story is less whimsical and much more grim. To the accompaniment of “Pure Imagination” — a song from the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” sung this time by Fiona Apple — a scarecrow who no longer has fields to guard goes to work in a factory painted with a dusty, neglected image of what a family farm used to look like. As he labors to prop up the crumbling factory (“Crow Foods: Feeding the World!”), he peers through cracks and spies frantic chickens given injections that swell them to three times their size, and sad-eyed cows confined in tiny boxes. Ground down and sad, he slouches home at the end of a work day and finds — well, take a look:

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USDA: Chicken Processed in China Can be Sold in the US Without Labels to Say So

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source: nugget photo and poor Photoshop skills by me.

Catching up to this news, which dropped quietly just before the holiday weekend: In a first, the US Department of Agriculture has given permission for chicken products processed in the People’s Republic of China to be sold in the United States without labeling that would indicate where the chicken products came from.

The news was broken by Politico, whose writers obtained USDA documents before the agency released them, and then followed up by the New York Times, with some no-holds-barred analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know that food safety in China is well below US standards. (See this post for stories of toxic vinegar, glow-in-the-dark pork, and more.) So it may be a surprise to hear that birds grown and slaughtered outside that country, but cooked and made into products in it, would be acceptable for sale here. Especially since the plants that USDA has approved for sales into the US market will not have USDA inspectors on site.

Here is the USDA notice, in the form of an audit issued by the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

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Two Former FDA Commissioners Agree: Ag Antibiotic Policies Must Change

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source: Anselm (CC), Flickr

This is an ICYMI (“in case you missed it”) post, twice over. Last week, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Donald Kennedy, Ph.D., wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which he urged that the FDA change how it regulates antibiotics that are used in agriculture as part of meat production.

His prescription is notable, not just in itself, but because it marks the second time in a few months that a former commissioner of the FDA used a major paper’s op-ed page to criticize his former agency’s conduct on farm antibiotic use. David A. Kessler, M.D., did the same thing, hitting many of the same points, in the New York Times in March.

Kennedy was FDA Commissioner from 1977 to 1979, just as scrutiny of antibiotic use in livestock-raising was beginning. (There’s a timeline in this post.) Kessler was Commissioner from 1990 to 1997, during the time in which the FDA began to look for, and find, antibiotic-resistant bacteria on retail meat. There were almost 20 years between their tenures — and 16 years from Kessler to now — and yet almost nothing has changed.

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More Tickborne Diseases Other Than Lyme. Maybe Just Don't Go Outside.

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source: L’Olio (CC), Flickr

I said in Monday’s post (about the CDC changing its estimate of Lyme disease diagnoses in the US, raising it 10-fold from 30,000 new cases per year to 300,000) that there has been a run of recent news about other tickborne diseases. If you are someone who loves the outdoors — or even, you know, your back garden — it’s important to pay attention to such research, because these diseases are just becoming known and thus are often not recognized by physicians. Which means, of course, that someone who has the misfortune to contract one might be misdiagnosed, might be given antibiotics that won’t work against the organism, or might even be dismissed as malingering.

The most recent and saddest piece of news: Joseph Osumbe Elone, a 17-year-old high school student from Poughkeepsie, NY, died earlier this month from what is believed to have been an infection with Powassan virus, one of these lesser-known tickborne diseases. According to his family, he had been mildly ill for several weeks, with a cough but no striking symptoms, and collapsed and died Aug. 4.

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CDC: Lyme Disease May Be Diagnosed 10 Times More Than Estimated

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source: Cuatrok77 (CC), Flickr

Recently I visited a relative on the eastern end of Long Island, about 90 miles outside New York City. The heat was brutal, and the house had no air conditioning and wasn’t accommodating to breezes — so on the first night I arrived, I sat out on the deck as the sun sank and the air cooled. Just as it became too dim to see the far end of the garden, there was a thrashing noise, as though something had gotten caught in the hedge beyond the pool, and then a whffft as whatever had tangled itself sailed over the obstacle. A moment later, something spiny but soft-edged poked into the sliver of light from the window, and bobbed, and bowed toward the ground. The spiny bits were antlers; the intruders were two white-tailed bucks, at least a year old, come to munch on the unattended lawn.

Because I am a city kid, my first thought was, “Aww, that’s pretty.” And because I am me, my next one was: “I wonder what the Lyme disease situation is out here?”

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Antibiotic Use in Chickens: Responsible for Hundreds of Human Deaths?

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In the long back and forth between science and agriculture over the source of antibiotic resistance in humans — Due to antibiotic overuse on farms, or in human medicine? — one question has been stubbornly hard to answer. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria do arise on farms, do they leave the farm and circulate in the wider world? And if they do, how much damage do they do?

A multi-national team of researchers recently published their answers to both questions. Their answer: In Europe, 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred.

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'Nightmare Bacteria' Attack an ICU and Close a Burn Unit

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Flickr: Denis Bocquet, CC

I thought I was done for the time being with “nightmare bacteria” (the US CDC’s characterization of disease organisms resistant to the last-ditch antibiotics called carbapenems), but there are two stories today that deserve to be called out as examples of how rapidly and dangerously these pathogens are spreading.

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More on 'Nightmare Bacteria': Maybe Even Worse Than We Thought?

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Flickr: CelesteH, CC

In my last post I talked about the under-appreciated emergence of “nightmare bacteria” (those are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s words, not mine) that are widely distributed in hospitals and nursing homes around the world and do not respond to a last-ditch small family of antibiotics called carbapenems. That seemed dire enough, but new research suggests the problem, bad as it looks, has been understated.

There’s an ahead-of-print article in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy whose authors include David Shlaes, a physician-researcher and former pharmaceutical executive, now consultant, and Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease physician on the UCLA medical faculty and author among other books of Rising Plague, about antibiotic resistance. In a commentary examining the Food and Drug Administration’s promised “reboot” of antibiotic development rules, they analyze privately gathered data on resistance in the United States and conclude the incidence of highly resistant bacteria is greater than the CDC has estimated.

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Where 'Nightmare Bacteria' Came From, And How Our Inattention Helped Them Emerge

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Zebbie (CC), Flickr

Cast your minds back a few months ago, to when the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced, “We have a very serious problem” with “nightmare bacteria,” and the chief medical officer of the United Kingdom backed him up a few days later, describing a “ticking time bomb” that threatens national security as seriously as terrorism.
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More on MRSA on Farms and in Farm Workers, and the Arguments for and Against

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Photo: ROIrving/ Flickr

In my last post I promised to catch up on some of the other research that has been published on the flow of MRSA (and other resistant organisms) between farm animals and farm workers as a result of farm antibiotic use.

Before I do that, though, I want to nod toward two other great pieces published on this. First, Mark Bittman  examined this issue closely at the New York Times. And Clare Leschin-Hoar also covered the new research at Take Part. (Bonus: Don’t miss her dissection of the news that a National Geographic photographer was arrested in Kansas after taking pictures of a feedlot — from the air.)

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"Pig MRSA" Carried by Workers from North Carolina Intensive Hog Farms

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Pig farms from the air. Maryn McKenna, Creative Commons License

I saved this post until today to allow everyone to get their holiday hot dogs guilt-free. Now that’s over: An important study has just been published which makes a close connection between the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the use of antibiotics on large-scale conventional hog farms. Bonus: It involves the resistant bacterium MRSA ST398 (known in shorthand as “pig MRSA”), which is widespread in Europe but up to this point has been found mainly in only one state in the US, Iowa. With this paper, the count rises to two(see Update): The study subjects in this paper are hog-farm workers in eastern North Carolina.

A quick explanation of why this is important: “Pig MRSA” is a particular strain of drug-resistant staph that is slightly different from the hospital and community (sports, gym) varieties. It was first spotted in the Netherlands in 2004, in the toddler daughter of pig farmers and in the family’s pigs. Since then, it has spread widely across Europe, not just in agriculture, but in healthcare and in everyday life, and has also been found widely in retail meat.

The question of whether livestock production’s use of antibiotics causes antibiotic-resistant bacteria to move into the wider world is much argued-over, and pig MRSA, or ST398 to be polite, is crucial to that dispute. That’s because, unlike most resistant bacteria, it has a genetic signature that makes an inarguable link back to farm drug use. More on that below. (If you want more, here’s an archive of my posts on ST398; the story of its emergence in 2004 and what happened afterward is told in my 2010 book SUPERBUG.)

Now, the study. Quick summary, with more unpacking to follow: Researchers checked livestock-farm workers in North Carolina to see whether they were carrying staph, and also drug-resistant staph. The workers formed two groups: one group worked at conventional hog operations, which routinely use antibiotics, and the other group at antibiotic-free farms. Both groups carried staph and also drug-resistant staph, which would be expected; about 30 percent of the population carries sensitive staph and about 4 percent carries the drug-resistant form. But, the key difference: Workers from the conventional, antibiotic-using farms were many times more likely to carry staph with the specific signature of farm-drug use.

That illuminates a potential occupational risk to the workers — and it also suggests that the workers could be a channel for that farm-influenced bacterium to move off the farm.

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Writing Narratives About Science: Advice From People Who Do it Well

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Flickr: Zen, CC

Starting to catch up after, yup, another set of trips — but with really interesting stuff to talk about very shortly. To start: I spent part of this past week at the biannual World Conference of Science Journalists, which was in Helsinki this time. (Yes, way up north. Yes, midnight sun, almost — disorienting and gorgeous). While I was there I joined the excellent journalists Ed Yong Of Not Exactly Rocket Science, Helen Pearson of Nature, and Alok Jha of the Guardian and the BBC to talk about the craft of writing long narrative features about science. Among ourselves we talked about wanting to avoid being “lost in the Features Dark Place” — which is to say, being overwhelmed by your material to the point where you don’t know where to start.

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G8 Meeting Begins: Ag Antibiotics on Agenda?

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Photo: Caro’s Lines (CC), Flickr

Quick post today as I’m getting ready for some travel. Just to note: The G8 summit is beginning in Ireland, and there is a push on to put intensive agriculture and its antibiotic use on the agenda for discussion by the major Western economies.

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