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

2012 In The Rear-View Mirror: What You Liked

January 1, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment


Happy New Year, constant readers. For the second year in a row, here’s my list of which of my posts (91 in 2012!) most moved you to react. Last year (find that list here), I counted down based on which posts provoked the most comments. This year, Wired installed a tweet-counter — which registers only if someone clicks through from Twitter, but not if the post’s URL is mentioned or RT’d — so I thought it would be amusing to score posts that way this year.

And the verdict is: You care enormously about food policy, but you continue to be fascinated by the emergence of scary diseases — and, to my surprise and pleasure, you care about public understanding of science as well.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, chagas, chicken, diabetes, FDA, NRDC, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs, shrimp, TB

News Round-Up: Sausage, Soil, Skeeters, Camping, China, Chimps And Other Hazards

August 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This has been my week: Oh, wow: I should write about that. No, wait — that. Damn, new news; I’ll blog this paper instead. Except, hold on — this one is great too…

So to solve my indecision before the week ends, here you go: Most of this week’s most interesting news, in round-up form.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, China, counterfeit, drugs, food, food policy, food safety, foodborne, meat, MRSA, Reuters, russia, Science Blogs, South Korea, TB

Highest Rates Ever Recorded of Multi-Drug-Resistant TB

February 16, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

On the heels of the news of totally drug-resistant (TDR) TB being identified in India — and disavowed, unfortunately, by the Indian government — the World Health Organization has released an update on the background situation of drug-resistant TB around the world.

The news is not good. Drug-resistant TB is at the highest rates ever recorded.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Africa, Europe, india, Russian, Science Blogs, TB, TDR, Who

TDR-TB: The Indian Government Denies It

January 29, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

An update to the news two weeks ago of totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, TDR-TB, being identified in India (and earlier in Italy and Iran): The Indian government has announced that it doesn’t exist, and is putting pressure on the physicians who identified it to say they made a mistake.

Because, of course, that’s going to keep a disease from spreading.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, NDM-1, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

Totally Drug-Resistant TB: A Patient Is Missing

January 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There was a lot of interest in  in TDR-TB Friday; both The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC and Science Friday kindly asked me to be on to talk about it. While I was waiting for the phone link to Science Friday to become live, an alarming bulletin arrived in my e-mail. The early-warning list ProMED reported that the existence of two additional cases of TDR-TB have been disclosed, in Bangalore, 600 miles from Mumbai where the first known Indian cases were identified. The patients, a 56-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, had been coming to a hospital for directly observed administration of their TB for more than two years; they were initially recognized as MDR-TB patients, with disease that was highly resistant but not untreatable, but were not getting better. For the past two weeks, though, the man has not shown up, and no one appears to know where he is.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, india, Iran, Italy, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

Totally Resistant TB: Earliest Cases in Italy

January 12, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A follow-up to Monday’s post on the recognition in India of totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, TDR-TB: The fantastic early-warning list ProMED points out that the earliest recorded cases of TDR were not the current 12 known cases in Mumbai or the 15 cases in Iran in 2009, but rather two women from Italy who died in 2003 after  being sick for several years.

It’s a sad story that was briefly recounted in 2007 in the journal EuroSurveillance, published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, Iran, Italy, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

India Reports Completely Drug-Resistant TB

January 9, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Well, this is a bad way to start the year.

Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.

News of some of the cases was published Dec. 21 in an ahead-of-print letter to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which just about everyone missed, including me. (But not, thankfully, the hyper-alert global-health blogger Crawford Kilian, to whom I hat-tip.) That letter describes the discovery and treatment of four cases of TDR-TB since last October. On Saturday, the Times of India disclosed that there are actually 12 known cases just in one hospital, the P. D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre; in the article, Hinduja’s Dr. Amita Athawale admits, “The cases we clinically isolate are just the tip of the iceberg.” And as a followup, the Hindustan Times reported yesterday that most hospitals in the city — by extension, most Indian cities — don’t have the facilities to identify the TDR strain, making it more likely that unrecognized cases can go on to infect others.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

Tuberculosis: Forgotten but not gone

March 24, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s World TB Day: 129 years ago today, Robert Koch announced the identification of the tuberculosis bacillus. It must have looked, back then, as though solving TB — effectively the AIDS of the 19th century, the disease that took leading artists and writers in the prime of their creative lives and inspired novels, poems and operas of loss — was tantalizingly close at hand.

But not. In 2011, the World Health Organization reports, tuberculosis is stubbornly persisting, and the twin problems of multidrug-resistant and extensively drug resistant TB — MDR and XDR — are growing worse. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, Science Blogs, TB, Who

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