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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