Superbug

Antibiotic resistance. The things we do to make it worse. And anything else I find interesting. Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author who writes about domestic and global public health, infectious disease, medicine, and food policy, but it's OK with her if you just call her Scary Disease Girl, since almost everyone else does. She has reported fr... om inside a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand's west coast that was erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a CDC team investigating the anthrax-letter attacks on Capitol Hill, a graveyard within the Arctic Circle that held victims of the 1918 flu, a malaria hospital in Malawi, an isolation ward for multi-drug resistant TB in Vietnam and a polio-eradication team in India. She untangled birds from mist nets during the first US outbreaks of West Nile virus, triggered the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and pried loose enough hidden history at a closed nuclear-weapons plant to help local residents win a nuclear-harm lawsuit against the US government. She is the author of the newly published SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010), an investigation of the global epidemic of drug-resistant staph, and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (FP/S&S, 2004), a narrative history of the CDC's disease detectives that was named a Top Science Book by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. She writes for SELF, More, Health and other national magazines, and is a regular contributor to the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Previously, she was a staff reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Boston Herald, and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and a contributing writer at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota. She has a bachelor's from Georgetown University, a master's from Northwestern University, and has won numerous journalism awards. She has ...Read More