Let’s play a thought experiment. Imagine that you’re a major pharmaceutical company, a public company, with shareholders that you answer to, and market analysts looking over your shoulder to see whether this quarter’s earnings are up to projections. Imagine that you want to make a new drug. Let’s make it an antibiotic, because — as [...]
Folks, I told you Tuesday about a Congressional hearing on antibiotic resistance, featuring NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden. Not much new was said, but it’s encouraging that the hearing was held at all. (Fauci testimony here, Frieden here.)
Coincidentally, constant reader Pat Gardiner of the UK alerted me to a [...]
Constant readers: There’s an important new paper that’s been out for a week that I haven’t gotten to you. I apologize; it’s been busy. (Let’s not even talk about the important paper that’s been out for two weeks. Maybe over the weekend…)
We’ve talked for ages now about the potential dangers of unrestricted antibiotic use in [...]
Constant readers, CBS News has posted some follow-up video to its two-part series last week on antibiotics in agriculture. It features Dr. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (which under its current leadership has vowed to re-examine farm-antibiotic use), and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation.
They talk about the protests [...]
Constant readers, I hope you watched the second day of CBS News’ series on antibiotic use in farming, and how it promotes the emergence of antibiotic-resistant infections in animal and humans. I found it surprisingly hard-hitting. Here’s the video and the text version.
Most of the report explored the farm experience in Denmark, which in 1998 [...]
Constant readers, I hope you saw the CBS News package on antibiotics in farming Tuesday night. (It continues Wednesday.) MRSA played a prominent role, in an account of infections among workers at a chicken plant (the same outbreak, I think, as was described by Prevention magazine last August) and in questions about MRSA in pig [...]
There’s a tremendous amount of buzz in the blogosphere about a series of pieces that are supposed to run on CBS News over the next several days, looking at the use of antibiotics in agriculture. For one of many posts on the topic, look at this piece from Food Safety News, an online newsletter founded [...]
Happy New Year, constant readers. I’m honored and flattered to have had the chance to spend the past few years with you here. 2010 is going to be a big year — not just because SUPERBUG will be published, but because the issue of antibiotic resistance really, really is gathering force in the public mind. [...]
From the January issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the CDC (and therefore free. Must I keep urging you to read it? Go, already), here’s a roundup of bad news about bad bugs.In Canada, researchers from that country’s Public Health Agency have found a “strong correlation” between the use of ceftiofur, a third-generation cephalosporin, [...]
From the excellent and forward-thinking research team at Extending the Cure comes a dismaying report: over 7 years, a more than 3-fold increase in resistance in the Gram-negative bacterium Acinetobacter baumanii to its drug of last resort, imipenem.
Because MRSA is a Gram-positive, we don’t talk much here about the Gram-negatives — the two categories of [...]
Incentives for making new antibiotics: What would it take?
Comments closedAntibiotic resistance in food — some governments pay attention
Comments closedAntibiotics and farming — how superbugs happen
0 CommentsAntibiotics and farming — CBS follow-up video
0 CommentsCBS antibiotics and farming, day 2 – and more on the Danish experience
0 CommentsCBS antibiotics and farming package, day one
0 CommentsFarming and antibiotics – and voices from the ag side
0 CommentsQuestioning meat-raising and meat-eating — in eat-everything France
0 CommentsAntibiotics in chickens and links to human infections
0 CommentsAnother resistant bug rising: Acinetobacter
0 Comments© 2013 Maryn McKenna. All Rights Reserved.
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