Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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One Family's Journey From Foodborne-Illness Victim to "Food Patriots"

December 19, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A quick post today, because I have deadlines, and because this Kickstarter closes tomorrow and you should take a look at it while you can.

In February of 2006, when he was 16 years old, Sam Spitz went out for lunch with his high school pals. They were athletes, and looking for a big meal, so they went to a pizza-pasta place. Sam, though, had an inkling of healthy eating from his mother, Jennifer Amdur Spitz, who liked to shop at farmers’ markets. He chose a chicken Caesar salad instead.

By the end of the school day, it seemed like a bad choice. He developed diarrhea so severe that Jennifer and his dad, Jeff Spitz, had to tape an adult diaper on him to get him to the emergency room. The ER staff assumed it was a foodborne illness, took a culture, and sent them home with a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

It had no effect. It took weeks, along with visits to specialists and more tests and more drugs and eventually a colonoscopy, before the family discovered that what had felled the strapping young athlete was an antibiotic-resistant foodborne illness: Campylobacter, a bug that frequently travels on chicken.

Sam Spitz was seriously sick for a month and recovering for many more. He was a pitcher, but missed his entire baseball season, along with the chance to be inspected by college recruiters. He was still on restricted activity when the football recruiters came around the following fall. He eventually recovered (and played football for University of Wisconsin) — but his family’s attitude toward food and food safety was forever changed.

The Spitzes, who are award-winning filmmakers, have documented their journey to a better understanding of our food system in a new film that they are now polishing, called “Food Patriots.” In it, they talk not only about their own dawning understanding of how our food is produced, but also about many other people who are trying to get food grown and distributed in a healthier, more equitable way.

“We were really insulated, as a family, from knowing where our food comes from, and from having the awareness that allows you to make healthy choices,” Jennifer told me. “But this film has a much bigger footprint than just our journey. We’re in it to provide a narrative, and some humor — but what we do is look at people who are inspiring us to think about, buy and eat food differently.”

The Spitzes are in their last 24 hours on their Kickstarter. They have made their initial goal, which was to fund post-production — but in the last day, they’ve been offered a match by a major donor. Anything they receive today will be doubled by the donor, and those funds will be spent getting the film out to communities for screenings.

Jennifer described the film to me as “zero-depth” — like the kind of public pool where you can stand at the end with just your toes wet, and move deeper at your own pace. “There have been a lot of scary, hit-you-over-the-head food films already, and people have already responded to that approach,” she said. “We don’t preach. We want to get people into conversation.”

Take a look.

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Footnote: If antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter sounds at all familiar, it may be because I wrote about it in my two-year investigation of foodborne illness for SELF Magazine last summer. Here’s that story and my post about it.

Flickr/mollyeh11/CC

 

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: chicken, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self

The Superbugs In Your Dinner: A Storify

June 7, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As I said Wednesday would happen, I participated in a Twitterchat today about antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses arising as a result of agricultural antibiotic use. This is the subject of my investigative piece in the June issue of SELF Magazine. Chat participants were me and blogger and cancer survivor Lisa Bonchek Adams, with many constant readers checking in. And because I’m sure you were all busy, but I want you to know what we talked about, I made a Storify for you. You’re welcome.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self, twitter

The Superbugs in Your Dinner (Bonus: Twitterchat!)

June 6, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new story up at SELF Magazine, where I’m privileged to do a long and often investigative piece about once a year. This one is close to my heart: It took two years to complete, and in that time I conducted 37 interviews and reviewed several hundred scientific papers.

Here’s what it says: The misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, particularly in livestock-raising, is creating antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses that are taking victims and their doctors by surprise.

We talk pretty often here about drug-resistant bacteria arising as a result of farm antibiotic use, and moving off the farm in a variety of ways. There is a lot of dispute, of course, about whether farm-caused antibiotic resistance has much effect on human health, or whether the various resistant illnesses that people contract arise instead from antibiotic misuse in daily life or in hospitals and health care.

But in this case, the illnesses are being caused specifically by classic foodborne bugs that have become resistant and are making people sick when the food is handled or eaten. The evidence is not 100 percent — no evidence ever is — but to me, these illnesses demonstrate the most direct link yet between antibiotic use on farms, and human illness far away from farm areas.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self

Little-Known Killer: A Young Mom Survives Sepsis

December 22, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In honor of Christmas and Hanukkah and other solstice-centered holidays, and the warmth and compassion they make us want to extend to each other in the dark of the year, let me tell you a story about someone extraordinary.

Carol Decker is a wife and mom of two toddlers who lives in a small town at the foot of Mount Rainier in Washington. She is extraordinary not for professional achievements, but for very personal ones. Against overwhelming odds, she survived one of the most common, least-recognized illnesses in the United States: sepsis, which attacks an estimated 750,000 Americans each year, more than breast and lung cancer combined, and kills approximately one person every three minutes. What makes her extraordinary, though, is not only that she survived — because she had a lot of help doing that, including a smart and sympathetic medical team, thorough rehabilitative care, a supportive community and a loving and determined spouse — but that she found the courage and grace to embrace the changed life that sepsis left her with.

[Read more…]

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

Decolonization: disappointing news

July 23, 2009 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I know that many of you who are MRSA patients, especially with recurrent infections, are especially interested in the issue of decolonization, the grueling regimen of antibiotic nasal gel (containing mupirocin; usually sold as Bactroban) combined with body washes with chlorhexidine (Hibiclens) that is believed to eradicate MRSA carriage in the nose and on the skin. Decolonization is an essential part of the “search and destroy” measures practiced by zero-tolerance hospitals who want to detect any MRSA transport in their institution, and it is a last-ditch hope in recurrent community-strain infections. (I told the story of several women’s struggles with recurrent infections in SELF and Health magazines.)

It’s disheartening, then, to realize that decolonization is not a universally agreed-upon measure, and there is relatively little research that can say in which setting (household, hospital, ICU) it works best, and why. There have been a few studies, and a few review papers summing up studies, on the role that decolonization can play in reducing the risk of infection in already hospitalized, colonized patients — ones about to undergo surgery, for instance. A meta-analysis by the Cochrane group, of 8 trials, found that decolonization in the hospital did reduce the likelihood of infections in surgical patients.

The role that decolonization can play in short-circuiting community infections is much less clear, though there are many, many people who have suffered recurrent infections and testify that it worked for them. (Please speak up in the comments if you are!) One problem is that outside hospitals, there is no one recommended regimen: One physician might tell her patient to use mupirocin and chlorhexdine only, whereas another might tell his patient to also take bleach baths, or bleach all the laundry or household surfaces. The CDC has so far declined to put its muscle behind decolonization in community-strain infections, recommending only that frustrated patients with recurrences seek the advice of an infectious-disease specialist. (See this flowchart of treatment options (.pdf) that the CDC published in 2007.)

Comes now the infectious-diseases division of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, whom some of you will recognize as being among the most successful and evangelical practitioners of “search and destroy” in the United States. (ENW has recently been renamed NorthShore University HealthSystem and is affiliated with Northwestern University. Disclosure, in case you care: I went to grad school at Northwestern, though not in medicine.) In a paper published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the group evaluates the use and success rate of decolonization in ENW/NorthShore’s 3 hospitals and finds, well, not such good news: a temporary reduction in patients’ being colonized with MRSA, but no success in preventing infection.

This is an important and troubling finding, because decolonization comes with costs. There is the obvious cost to hospitals (and the follow-on cost to insurance companies and consumers) of paying for mupirocin and chlorhexidine themselves. But there is also a hidden cost that we here should be particularly sensitive to: Because mupirocin is being used so lavishly, mupirocin resistance is rising.

In the same issue of ICHE (which, yes, is pronounced Itchy), a related editorial by Dutch researchers reviews the difficulty of conducting decolonization trials, but summarizes the ENW/NorthShore study as not an endorsement of decolonization regimens:

It is clear that staphylococcal carriage is an important risk factor for infection and that eradication of carriage has proven successful for patients who are undergoing elective surgery. For other groups of patients, it is still unclear what the benefits are. It is obvious that indiscriminate use of mupirocin is associated with development of resistance. Therefore, additional studies are warranted to define the optimal MRSA decolonization strategy, including what should be given, to whom, and at what moment and who should guide and supervise the regimen.

The cites are:
Robicsek A, Beaumont JL, Thomson RB Jr et al. Topical therapy for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus colonization:impact on infection risk. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;30(7):623-32.
Kluytmans J, Harbarth S. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus decolonization: “Yes, we can,” butwill it help? Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;30(7):633-5.

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: MRSA, Science Blogs, self, surveillance

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