Maryn McKenna

Maryn McKenna Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist in Atlanta, Georgia, and a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University in Atlanta. View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed…

In the intensive care ward of Radboud University Medical Center, a sprawling hospital in the southeastern Netherlands, Paul Verweij was worried. The physician-scientist was accustomed to dealing with very sick patients; as chair of medical…

Ella Balasa was 26 when she realized the routine medical treatments that sustained her were no longer working. The slender lab assistant had lived since childhood with the side effects of cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that turns mucus in the…

A report released today by the United Nations says that we’ve neglected a major component of the superbug problem: the environment. It serves as a reservoir for bacterial genes that create antimicrobial resistance, and it receives farm run-off and…

To an unfamiliar eye, the press release from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health two weeks ago looked pretty routine. Its language was a little unnerving, maybe, but phrased carefully: Analysts had discovered a resident with a strain of…

Dustin Brown, a slight, dark-haired guy who lives in southwest Indiana, is 36, married, and a stay-at-home dad. He never expected to achieve any of those milestones: wife, toddler son, moving away from his family in Kentucky. Not even adulthood.…

The desperate need to save the lives of Covid patients during the pandemic’s first waves, coupled with shortages of hospital personnel and protective equipment, drove a shocking reversal in progress against deadly superbugs, according to a new…

New federal data released Tuesday shows that efforts in the United States to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use in livestock—a persistent generator of drug-resistant superbugs that can harm human health—have lost momentum, five years after the Obama…

Last month, a 46-year-old military veteran in Houston died of pancreatitis, an urgent but treatable condition, while waiting to be admitted to a hospital overwhelmed with unvaccinated Covid patients. Last week, the governor of Hawaii signed an…

If something isn't done now, antibiotic-resistant bacteria could kill as many as 10 million people a year by 2050. A little-known Boston nonprofit could be our best hope.

We’ve known the dangers of antimicrobial resistance for years. What if we used what we learned from covid to tackle it?

What began as a means of increasing the productivity of livestock farming has grown into one of the burgeoning health crises of our era.

Growing evidence suggests that, as the Covid-19 pandemic moves across the world, it may drag a second slow-motion pandemic behind it. Even though Covid-19 is a viral illness not affected by antibiotics, early data from hospitals shows that very high…

As the COVID-19 pandemic caught hold early this year, a small drug company outside Philadelphia was struggling to market a compound that could help patients battling for their lives.

Last month, a massive group of business leaders and health officials gathered for one of the biggest events in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. Almost 350 parties showed up to pledge support for the AMR Challenge, a program whose goal is…

Across the world, the antibiotics that farmers use to prevent illness in their animals are losing effectiveness as bacteria develop antibiotic resistance. According to new research, it’s a huge problem, one that’s been masked by a longstanding focus…

Last September, an American traveling in Kenya suffered a serious stroke, and was hospitalized there for a month. The stay didn’t go well: The person suffered a bout of pneumonia, a urinary tract infection, and a brush with sepsis, a life-threatening…

So where are antibiotics supposed to come from? Last month I wrote about the unexpected bankruptcy of the small biotech firm Achaogen, which declared Chapter 11 despite having brought out a needed new antibiotic. It’s remarkable that, in the five…

Last week, the biotech company Achaogen announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. That might not seem like much news: Businesses crash and burn all the time. But Achaogen, founded in 2002, was an antibiotics company. Its first drug, Zemdri…