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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Background: The M in MRSA stands for methicillin, the first of the semi-synthetic penicillins, created by Beecham Laboratories in 1960 in response to a worldwide 1950s outbreak of penicillin-resistant staph. The central feature of the chemical structure of both penicillin and methicillin is an arrangement of four atoms, known as the beta-lactam ring, that governs both drugs' ability to interfere with bacterial cell-wall synthesis. That structure was copied into the formulas of a number of other drug families -- the cephalosporins, carbapenems and monobactams -- and so MRSA is resistant to them as well. And in addition, the bug has picked up resistance to yet other drug families through horizontal transfer; so increasing the census of new drugs that can treat resistant staph infections is a high priority for drug development. It's especially critical for severe infections such as ventilator-associated pneumonia, osteomyelitis, endocarditis and bacteremia, since all the remaining last-resort drugs have challenges from toxicities to ineffectiveness in certain organs.

Linezolid is a relatively new drug, out since 2000 (and, as a downside, still under patent and, according to patients who have been prescribed it, very expensive). It was the first of a new drug class, the oxazolidinones; since there were no "me too" similarities to older drugs, clinicians hoped that resistance to linezolid would be slow in coming.

No such luck.

Comes now the CDC to save the day. In a statistical brief posted today, the National Center for Health Statistics gives a concise but thorough overview of the state of dental insurance in the US. Short version: Ain't pretty.

The witness line-up is:

Hepatitis B is blood-borne, so on the surface, this is a story of the tragic consequences of some failure somewhere in the clinic's infection-control procedures. (One reason why it caught my eye, since I'm interested in healthcare-associated infections.) Except that it's not -- or not only. It's important to unpick why such an extraordinarily large number of people may have been exposed at one time. Looked at through that lens, it becomes a story about what can happen when we don't fund basic health care in a timely way.

By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here.

Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph. So in its first incarnation, the blog was an examination of the emergence of the three overlapping epidemics of MRSA, in hospitals, in the community and in food animals. But it was also an inquiry into the cultural forces that increase the prevalence of resistant organisms, from poor hygiene in overcrowded prisons to antibiotic overuse on overcrowded industrial-scale farms.

The book's been out for two months now (if you're curious, here's the official site, an excerpt, and samples of critical and press reaction). That feels like enough time that I can widen the scope a bit.

A bit more about me: I've been a magazine writer since 2006 and was a newspaper science/medical reporter before that. Chief claim to fame: For 10 years, at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I was the only US journalist assigned to fulltime coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which meant that I got on a lot of last-minute flights to follow that agency's SWAT teams around the world. (Some of those stories are in my first book, BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.) Being CDC stenographer also meant that I wrote about the very early signals of outbreaks that later became huge public health concerns: the first case of avian flu jumping to a human in 1997, the first diagnosis of deliberately caused anthrax in 2001, the first cluster of SARS in 2003. Before Atlanta, I was a public health investigative reporter in Boston, where I was half of a team that uncovered the first cases of what's now known as Gulf War Syndrome; and in Cincinnati, where I dug into the hidden history of a closed nuclear weapons plant, and found enough carelessness and contamination to help local residents win a nuclear-harm suit against the US government.

What all that adds up to, and what you can expect to see on Superbug: antimicrobial resistance of course, and all the things we do to make it worse. (Anyone want to talk about chain drugstores giving antibiotics away for free?) But also: infectious diseases, especially emerging ones; zoonotic diseases, and the bacterial and viral traffic between us and the species we share space with; food policy and food safety; and public health, and especially public health policy and politics. Most of all, expect Superbug to be an inquisitive random walk through the abundant, ironic, unintended consequences of our shared decision-making. To me, that's where the most interesting stories always lie.