Posts

May 20, 2013

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5:28 PM | World Health Organization Annual Meeting: New Flu, Coronavirus Urgent Priorities

In Geneva today, the World Health Assembly — that is, the annual meeting of the 194 governments whose collective commitment support the World Health Organization — opened as traditional, with a speech by the WHO’s director-general, Dr. Margaret Chan. It ...

May 19, 2013

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12:32 PM | Fecal Transplants: The FDA Steps In

Hi constant readers: I am traveling again, and while I’m in a far time zone, news has broken that you might be interested in. So while I don’t have a full understanding myself yet of what’s going on, I’m going ...

May 12, 2013

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4:50 PM | More On The New Coronavirus: Cases in France, The WHO In Saudi Arabia

My last two posts looked at the problems that might be caused by hospital spread of the new coronavirus, based on what happened during the early days of SARS 10 years ago. Hospital spread of this new virus is a ...

May 09, 2013

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12:35 PM | How The New Coronavirus Might Be Like SARS: Hospital Spread (Part 2)

The most recent official update on the novel coronavirus raises the possibility that most of the recent cluster — 13 cases out of 30 — may be due to the novel disease spreading within one hospital. (Yesterday there were reports ...

May 07, 2013

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9:51 PM | How The New Coronavirus Might Be Like SARS: Hospital Spread

The most recent update on the novel coronavirus that has been spreading in the Mideast since last summer adds three more cases to the outbreak, and raises the possibility that most of the recent cluster — 13 cases out of ...

May 05, 2013

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6:13 PM | News Round-Up: Food, Foodborne Illness, And Antibiotic Resistance In Food

OK, still catching up. Today: food, foodborne illness, and antibiotic use and resistance in food — lots of news in a multi-item rundown. (Under normal circumstances, I’d give each of these items a post of its own; but since they ...

May 04, 2013

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4:16 PM | Transparency Unlocked: More New Saudi Coronavirus Cases Reported Quickly

In my last post 36 hours ago, I raised questions about Saudi Arabia’s apparent delay in reporting new cases of the novel coronavirus that has been causing low-level unease since last summer. (For the full history of that, check these ...

May 02, 2013

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10:33 PM | New Diseases And National Transparency: Who Is Measuring Up?

I’m still catching up on all the news that happened during the weeks I was away, and I had a food-policy post just about set to go today. And then this happened. I opened my morning mail to find a ...

April 29, 2013

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1:41 PM | Industrial Slaughter, Antibiotic Use and Unhealthy Meat: Ted Conover in Harper’s

I don’t often recommend print magazines here, because I figure they already have their own megaphone, and whatever power we at Wired have to push along other writers, I’d rather use to promote bloggers who might not have high traffic. ...

April 28, 2013

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12:23 PM | News From The Road: No Drugs, Few Strategies, But A Little Good News On Antibiotic Resistance

So, hi, constant readers. Sorry, didn’t mean to disappear for quite that long. I’ve been on the road, first teaching for a week at the University of Wisconsin as their Science Writer in Residence, and then in New York to ...

April 05, 2013

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2:01 PM | The New Bird Flu, And How To Read The News About It

By now you’ve no doubt heard that international health authorities are deeply concerned about a new flu strain that has surfaced in China: H7N9, which so far has sickened at least 16 people and killed six of them. The outbreak ...

March 28, 2013

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8:12 PM | Gene Sequencing Pinpoints Antibiotic Resistance Moving From Livestock To Humans

The antibiotic era was barely 20 years old when people started raising concerns about using the new “miracle drugs” in agriculture. Penicillin first entered use in 1943, streptomycin in 1944, tetracycline in 1948 — and by 1965, the United Kingdom’s ...

March 11, 2013

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4:29 PM | ‘Catastrophic Threat’: UK Government Calls Antibiotic Resistance a ‘Ticking Time Bomb’

On the heels of the director of the US Centers for Disease Control declaring emerging antibiotic resistance a "nightmare," the UK's Chief Medical Officer released a report in which she calls resistance a "catastrophic threat" that poses a national security ...

March 06, 2013

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8:26 PM | ‘We Have a Limited Window of Opportunity’: CDC Warns of Resistance ‘Nightmare’

It's not normal for a top federal health official to deploy a word such as "nightmare," or warn: "We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm." But on Tuesday, the director the CDC said both ...

March 05, 2013

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1:30 PM | Getting More Farm Antibiotics Data: What Will It Take?

Sorry for the radio silence, constant readers: I’m preparing for the big annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, where I am on the board, and the tasks are piling up. Here’s one of the things that happened ...

February 24, 2013

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5:30 PM | “Sh*t, Just Ship It”: Felony Prosecution For Salmonella-Peanut Executives

A pretty extraordinary thing happened Thursday, here in Georgia: A district court in the middle part of the state unsealed a 76-count, 52-page indictment of former officials of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), charging them with fraud and conspiracy ...

February 14, 2013

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1:24 PM | Project Update: Resistance (The Film) Has A Kickstarter

About a year ago, I told you about an indie effort to put together a superbug documentary called Resistance. The filmmakers, Ernie Park and Michael Graziano (who made the excellent documentary Lunch Line about school lunch programs), have been traveling ...

February 12, 2013

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5:15 PM | Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Surround Big Swine Farms — In China as Well as the U.S.

A new study finds a diverse and deep reservoir of drug resistance genes in samples from Chinese pig farms. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna explains why this finding is a cause for alarm.

February 09, 2013

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8:49 PM | Antibiotics And Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria In Meat: Not Getting Better

A few days ago, the Food and Drug Administration released two important documents related to antibiotic use in livestock raising, and what the results of that antibiotic use are. I’d say that they released them quietly, except, when it comes ...

February 07, 2013

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4:56 PM | On Writing: Culture Looks Down On These Novels, But You Should Read Them Anyway

Dropping out of scary diseases and scary food for a moment, and into the (more) personal: This past weekend I spoke at Science Online, a fantastic conference in the Triangle area of North Carolina that brings together the different tribes ...

January 29, 2013

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6:56 PM | Why We Can’t See Inside Poultry Production, and What Might Change if We Could

Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health. Why isn't this being addressed? ...

January 17, 2013

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1:42 PM | Fecal Transplants: A Clinical Trial Confirms How Well They Work

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a piece in Scientific American about fecal transplants — replacing the stool in someone’s colon with stool donated by someone else — as a treatment for the pernicious, recurrent diarrhea caused ...

January 16, 2013

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6:01 PM | UK “Horseburger” Scandal: Did The Meat Originate In The US?

Millions of pre-made burgers sold by supermarkets in the United Kingdom and Ireland have been taken off the market after the meat they contain was found to contain DNA from both horses and pigs. Could the horsemeat have originated in ...

January 15, 2013

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9:37 PM | A Government Takes Ag Antibiotics Seriously — But Not Our Government

In a long debate that featured some stinging language, the British Parliament examined the use of antibiotics in agriculture for the first time in more than a decade. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna has the highlights.

January 11, 2013

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1:14 PM | Almost-Untreatable Gonorrhea: Proof That It’s Here

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might have noticed a thread on health authorities’ growing concern over gonorrhea not responding to the drugs used against it. (And if you didn’t notice you can find those posts ...

January 10, 2013

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5:58 PM | Polio Eradication: The Bad News Continues

When last we left the long asymptote of polio eradication, nine health workers in Pakistan who had been administering polio vaccine had been murdered, presumably by the Taliban or its sympathizers, because polio eradication has been cast by them as ...

January 01, 2013

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1:30 PM | 2012 In The Rear-View Mirror: What You Liked

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 ...

December 28, 2012

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6:45 PM | The Lost History And Unintended Consequences Of The Chicken Nugget

There are things in your life that are so ubiquitous, you never stop to consider them. Traffic signals. Magnets. For me, chicken nuggets. They seem to be everywhere: every fast-food chain, every kids’ menu, every supermarket freezer aisle. I don’t ...

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1:30 PM | The Advance of Ticks: New Areas, New Diseases, And A Weird Allergy To Meat

Following up on last week’s post about the advance of dengue: I’ve been keeping track of new news regarding other diseases transmitted by insects and arthropods, but haven’t had a chance to write them up. So here’s an end-of-year round-up. ...

December 26, 2012

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1:29 PM | Livestock MRSA Found For First Time In UK Milk

This paper almost slipped by me. It was published quietly a few weeks ago, and it’s a little eyebrow-raising. From EuroSurveillance, the open-access peer-reviewed bulletin of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (Europe’s CDC): The ST398 strain of MRSA, ...