July 20, 2010
Category: personal
Let me tell you a little story about my first husband.
We met when I was in graduate school. He was a foreign journalist working in America and I interned where he worked. I left town, finished my degree, moved back. We reconnected, got married, and were considered enough of a catch -- two sharp young thrusters, an investigative reporter and an editor -- to be head-hunted by a large paper in the Midwest.
To defuse romantic nostalgia, it is important to say that he was unsuited to marriage, with outsize appetites for beer and for women who were not me. But he was perfectly adapted to journalism, smart, bold, adored by his staff, and rising up the professional ladder fast enough to leave contrails.
We had not been at that paper very long when stupid actions by his supervisors confronted him with a choice that no one who loves their work wants to make: Stay and be ethically compromised, or leave with intact standards and an empty wallet. He chose to leave, yanking the brakes on his trajectory and blowing up his career.
I've always admired that action. I always wondered whether, faced with a similar situation, I'd be that brave.
Which is my way of saying that I'm leaving Scienceblogs.
I am I think the youngest sibling, having arrived 7 weeks ago after 3+ years at Blogger. I was flattered to be asked to join the excellent bloggers here and energized to be in a network. The Pepsi debacle was a grave disappointment. The follow-on revelations of what appear to be earlier questionable actions by Seed Media Group (here, here and here) are disturbing.
But what troubles me most, going forward, is Seed Media's glacially paced and indifferent communication with its bloggers, whose frustration was captured yesterday by PZ Myers and even more by Bora Z in a masterful must-read analysis. Without open and complete communication -- accountability, transparency, sunlight -- I can't feel secure that I won't be ethically compromised again.
That experience with my ex -- which also derailed my career for a while, because of course I left the paper with him -- taught me that the pain of an ethically based decision is an almost infallible guide to its correctness. Sacrificing my connection to this community, its mouthy contentiousness, fearsome expertise and generous welcomes -- and yeah, its traffic and its page ranks and its reputation -- hurts.
And therefore I'm sure it's the right thing to do.
I'll be resuming blogging for the time being at least at my old Blogger site, now renamed Superbugtheblog.com. If Superbug finds a new home, I'll make the announcement there also.
As of September 2010, SUPERBUG will be joining Wired.com's new line-up of "all-star science blogs" at this page.
I hope to see some of you there. Thank you for our time together here.
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 9:21 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 7, 2010
Category: personal • unintended consequences
I'm taking SUPERBUG offline while the Pepsi mess plays out.
I dislike and resent having to do this: I was flattered to join Sb and I have great respect for my Sciblings.
I acknowledge that Sb's management, Seed Media Group, made some concessions today, but I am dissatisfied that those changes came only after community protests, when they addressed issues that should -- could -- have been foreseen.
I'm also not convinced they go far enough, since the central issue of a corporate-sponsored blog that appears (still, functionally) indistinguishable from the independent blogs here has not been addressed. I don't want, by remaining, to appear to support the decision to publish that blog in its current form, when I don't support it.
I need to think these things through. So, publication is temporarily suspended.
Dammit.
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 11:39 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: personal • unintended consequences
I'm late to the party: I was in Europe, and before that I was in Los Angeles, and before that Colorado, and I am time-shifted and sleep-deprived (hate it: Takes away energy, intellectual nimbleness -- yeah, I got some -- and any ability to multi-task). And that's enough with the lame excuses.
Constant readers may have noticed by now that my Sciblings here at Sb are in a justified uproar about the inclusion of a new blog, Food Frontiers, sponsored -- that means "paid for" -- by Pepsi Co. Sb runs on advertising, but this paid space is not in the ad rails and banners, but in the main column. This was sprung on the blog community without advance notice on Tuesday.
A crapstorm ensued.
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 1:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: animal health • infectious disease • news break • resistance
(You leave the country for a few days -- I spoke at a conference in Brussels, which was was lovely, thanks for asking -- and all kinds of news breaks out. So, sorry to be late on this, but it's an important issue.)
Last week, the Food and Drug Adminstration took the first (baby, mincing, tentative) steps to address the problem of antibiotics being used in animal agriculture, not to treat disease, but to make animals grow up to market weight faster. This practice -- variously called subtherapeutic dosing, growth promotion, and "for production purposes" in the FDA's exceedingly careful language -- has been fully banned in the European Union for 4 years, and some aspects of the practice have been banned longer.
The simple reason for the ban: There's decades of good science and real-world experience showing that it contributes to the development of drug-resistant organisms in farm animals and the farm environment, organisms that leave farms in the animals and in their manure, and also contaminate the environment beyond farm borders via leakage into groundwater and dust blowing off manure lagoons.That movement off the farm is critical because many of the drugs used in agriculture are the same, or close analogs, of drugs used in human medicine; so resistance that develops on the farm endangers human health as well. (MRSA ST398, livestock-associated MRSA, is the latest example of this. Find a long archive of posts on ST398 here.)
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 8:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2010
Category: global health • infectious disease • public health
In the winter of 1999, I stood in an outpatient clinic in a pediatric hospital in New Delhi and listened to a father sobbing over the paralysis of his only son. He was a farmer and lived in Uttar Pradesh; counting walks, minibuses and trains, it had taken him 24 hours to get to the hospital. He had carried the toddler the entire way.
His son had gotten the drops, he insisted: Every time the teams came to his neighborhood -- which they did three, four times each year -- he or his wife had lined up all their children, the boy and his older sisters. His son had had 11, 12 doses, the man said. How could he have gotten polio? And it was polio, the doctor treating him confirmed, not one of the transient febrile paralyses that exist alongside the disease and make detection and diagnosis so complex in resource-poor settings. She saw this all the time, she confided. The massive polio-eradication campaigns that continually blanketed India had trouble reaching some resistant populations, and those children contracted polio because they were not vaccinated -- but children whose parents were compliant, who believed in the drops and made sure their children received them, became paralyzed as well.
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 10:13 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2010
Category: global health • infectious disease • news break • public health • resistance
There's a troubling item in this afternoon's issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR: The first report in the United States of a novel resistance mechanism that renders gram-negative bacteria extremely drug-resistant and that has been linked to medical care carried out in India or Pakistan.
The short item describes three isolates (E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterobacter cloacae) found in three patients in three states between January and June of this year. All three isolates produced New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), which has never been recorded in the US before. Because of that novel mechanism, the three isolates were resistant to the carbapenems usually used on the most serious gram-negative infections, in fact to all beta-lactam antibiotics (penicillins, cephalosporins, carbapenems, monobactams, etc.) except for one monobactam, aztreonam -- and they were also resistant to aztreonam through another mechanism that hasn't been identified yet. All three of the patients found carrying this novel resistance factor had undergone medical care in South Asia recently.
This may be the first finding of this mechanism in the US, but it's been causing alarm in Europe for at least two years.
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 2:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2010
Category: Superbug the book • personal
In case anyone's in the general vicinity of the Twin Cities this week:
On Tuesday night, I'll be discussing antibiotic use in US agriculture at Fair Food Fight Night (a regular event sponsored by the food-policy blog Fair Food Fight) with Thom Petersen of the Minnesota Farmers Union and Fair Food Fight's proprietor, novelist and food-policy writer Barth Anderson. 7 p.m. at the Cheeky Monkey Deli, 525 Selby, St. Paul.
On Wednesday, I get the chair at the head of the table for Brown Bag Lunch with a Journalist, noon at the East Lake Public Library, 2727 E. Lake St., Minneapolis, sponsored by the awesome Twin Cities Daily Planet. It's an intimate room, so very crunchy foodstuffs may not be the most excellent choice.
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 12:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2010
Category: infectious disease • public health • resistance
A set of papers published this month in two journals provide an unsettling glimpse into the rocketing incidence and complex epidemiology of one really scary pathogen, Acinetobacter baumanii.
In the all-star annuals of resistant bugs, A. baumanii is an underappreciated player. If people -- other than, you know, disease geeks -- recognize it, that is because it's become known in the past few years for its propensity to attack wounded veterans shipped to military hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan, earning it the nickname "Iraqibacter." (Important note: Steve Silberman of Wired magazine took an early look at this phenomenon in 2007, in a great story that analyzed the epidemiology of Iraqibacter to show that military infection control, not the environment of Iraq, was to blame for the bug's rapid emergence.) A. baumanii is a nasty bug, causing not just wound infections but pneumonia, urinary tract infections, meningitis and bacteremia. Even more nasty, it collects resistance factors like baseball cards, and is commonly resistant to at least 4 antibiotic classes. The most resistant strains are susceptible only to the so-toxic-we-put-it-back-on-the-shelf-decades-ago antibiotic colistin.
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 10:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2010
Category: drug development • news break • resistance
The Center for Global Development, a DC think-tank, is releasing what looks like a thoughtful report aimed at refocusing policy debates over drug resistance toward the epidemic's global impact, with particular attention to the the developing world.
Read on »
Posted by Maryn McKenna at 1:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
