Worth Reading: Warning Bells, Burn Pits, and Sewer Mysteries

A few of the recent pieces I've liked (or, in the case of the first item, found horribly disturbing but important):

Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Ringing the Warning Bell: Colistin-Resistant Klebsiella

J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica: Smoke Screen ("In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage--computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces--in open burn pits. Are toxic clouds from these sites making everyone sick?" Bonus: Celeste is quoted in the article.)

The New York Times' Room for Debate: Could Farms Survive Without Illegal Labor?

Helen Branswell at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: A Mystery in the Sewers (part of the Sewage Science: Stalking a Threat to Polio Eradication in the World's Sewers project)

Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: And then the smokers came for your sperm ...

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Back in November, researchers from China reported finding a gene that confers resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin in several E. coli isolates, and warned that pan-drug resistant Enterobacteriaceae -- a family of bacteria that includes common foodborne illness culprits E. coli and…