mmckenna | July 20, 2010Let 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…
mmckenna | July 7, 2010I'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…
mmckenna | July 7, 2010I'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 --Â 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.…
mmckenna | July 7, 2010(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…
mmckenna | June 28, 2010In 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.…
mmckenna | June 24, 2010There'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…
mmckenna | June 21, 2010In 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…
mmckenna | June 17, 2010A 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…
mmckenna | June 15, 2010The 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.
From the report's preface:
Problems with drug resistance have moved from the patient's bedside to threaten global public health. Drug resistance has dramatically increased the costs of fighting tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, has slowed gains against childhood dysentery and pneumonia, and threatens to undermine the push to treat people living with…
mmckenna | June 15, 2010Via the Journal of the American Medical Association, a report from Spain: the first recorded outbreak, in a Madrid hospital, of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to linezolid (Zyvox), one of only a few drugs still available to treat very serious infections of drug-resistant staph, MRSA. This is bad news.
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…
mmckenna | June 10, 2010A coule of days ago, I talked about the link between a potentially massive hepatitis B outbreak in West Virginia and the lack of access to primary dental care. I was mushy qualitatively descriptive, ahem, about the number of people who lack access to dental insurance.
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.
Crude preliminary population math:
There are currently 309 million Americans.
Based on census tables…
mmckenna | June 9, 2010Joanne Manaster (site, Twitter) and Jeff Shaumeyer (site, Twitter) are running a Summer Science Reading Contest for kids and teens. They're looking for science authors to contribute books as prizes. Some cool people have stepped up, including Sciblings Deborah Blum and Rebecca Skloot (and me), but they could definitely use more. C'mon, represent: Consider it an investment in future audiences.
mmckenna | June 8, 2010The Subcommittee on Health of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives has announced a hearing for Wednesday: "Promoting the Development of Antibiotics and Ensuring Judicious Use in Humans."
The witness line-up is:
Janet Woodcock, M.D., Director, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Food and Drug Administration
Robin Robinson, Ph.D., Director, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Department of Health and Human Services
Brad Spellberg, M.D., F.I.D.S.A., Associate Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Member,…
mmckenna | June 7, 2010Via ProMED Mail comes a news report that about 2,000 people in 5 states are being sought by health departments so they can be checked for hepatitis B infection. The potential source: the Mission of Mercy Dental Clinic, a free dental-care fair held just about a year ago in Berkeley County in the far north-east corner of West Virginia. The potentially infected include 1,137 people who were treated at the two-day clinic and 826 of the volunteers who worked there, from West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Three patients and two volunteers have…
mmckenna | June 7, 2010So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here.
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.…