Maryn McKenna

In February, a dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash…

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…

Glowing red skies and bitter ash-laden air are increasingly common across much of the US as the warming climate fuels vast wildfires. For years now, researchers have understood that wildfire smoke, and the noxious gases and soot particles it carries,…

Karen Lips has never forgotten the silence. It was the early 1990s; she was finishing her PhD in tropical biology, and had come back to a research site in Costa Rica, a protected reserve high up in the mountains, after a short break. On her previous…

An experimental vaccine that could protect millions of people living in the American Southwest from valley fever—an infection caused by a soil-dwelling fungus that is difficult to treat and can cause disability and death—has passed its first test of…

It has been a summer of floods. Northern Virginia at the end of last week, and Texas at the beginning, thanks to Tropical Storm Nicholas. Louisiana and New York City last month, following Hurricane Ida. New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut,…

These pathogens already kill 1.6 million people every year, and we have few defenses against them By Maryn McKenna Editor’s Note (3/21/23): The dangerous fungus Candida auris is spreading rapidly in hospitals and other health care facilities, the…

Standard treatments such as steroids, as well as illnesses such as diabetes, make the fungal infection worse By Maryn McKenna The hospital of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, a medical school in the town of Sevagram in the Indian…

Coffee plants were supposed to be safe on this side of the Atlantic. But the fungus found them. In the southern corner of Guatemala, outside the tiny mountain town of San Pedro Yepocapa, Elmer Gabriel’s coffee plants ought to be leafed-out and…

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…

Thanks to the compounds used to protect precious flowers, antifungal resistance is here—and it could be just as dangerous to humans as antibiotic resistance. The glass-walled landscaping center on the road south of Nijmegen looks like a gardener’s…

A pathogen that resists almost all of the drugs developed to treat or kill it is moving rapidly across the world, and public health experts are stymied how to stop it. By now, that’s a familiar scenario, the central narrative in the emergence of…