Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA

Maryn McKenna

Mar 2010 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

LURKING in our homes, hospitals, schools, and farms is a terrifying pathogen that is evolving faster than the medical community can track it or drug developers can create antibiotics to quell it. That pathogen is MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphyloccocus aureus—and Superbug is the first book to tell the story of its shocking spread and the alarming danger it poses to us all.

Doctors long thought that MRSA was confined to hospitals and clinics, infecting almost exclusively those who were either already ill or old. But through remarkable reporting, including hundreds of interviews with the leading researchers and doctors tracking the deadly bacterium, acclaimed science journalist Maryn McKenna reveals the hidden history of MRSA’s relentless advance—how it has overwhelmed hospitals, assaulted families, and infiltrated agriculture and livestock, moving inexorably into the food chain. Taking readers into the medical centers where frustrated physicians must discard drug after drug as they struggle to keep patients alive, she discloses an explosion of cases that demonstrate how MRSA is growing more virulent, while evolving resistance to antibiotics with astonishing speed. It may infect us at any time, no matter how healthy we are; it is carried by a stunning number of our household pets; and it has been detected in food animals from cows to chickens to pigs.

With the sensitivity of a novelist, McKenna portrays the emotional and financial devastation endured by MRSA’s victims, vividly describing the many stealthy ways in which the pathogen overtakes the body and the shock and grief of parents whose healthy children were felled by infection in just hours. Through dogged detective work, she discloses the unheard warnings that predicted the current crisis and lays bare the flaws that have allowed MRSA to rage out of control: misplaced government spending, inadequate public health surveillance, misguided agricultural practices, and vast overuse of the few precious drugs we have left.

Empowering readers with the knowledge they need for self-defense, Superbug sounds an alarm: MRSA has evolved into a global emergency that touches almost every aspect of modern life. It is, as one deeply concerned researcher tells McKenna, "the biggest thing since AIDS."

Ratings and reviews

Maryn McKenna's book is competent, readable and deeply disturbing. She takes real science, explains it for the layman or woman and allows the reader to draw their own view of the consequences at international, national and personal levels. "Superbug" explains but does not campaign, pointing the facts but not the finger. The book is refreshingly clear of the spin, ego and promotion often associated with the subject matter. There are no quack remedies here. There are no quick remedies here either. Stories are drawn from the experiences of those who suffered and those who investigated. Threaded carefully and seamlessly into the narrative, they are often harrowing, disturbing, and sometimes inspiring. It's a history of the problem in a world still without solutions and still writing the chapters of a very human disaster. MRSA st398, her "fourth epidemic" moving from animals to humans and breaking about our ears now, is pure dynamite. An important book and essential reading for health workers, veterinarians, livestock farmers and indeed all humanity now facing a world where antibiotics are no longer a universal panacea to major and minor bacterial infections. Pat Gardiner

About the author

Maryn McKenna is an award-winning science and medical writer and author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (named one of the top 10 science books of 2004 by Amazon). She currently works as a contributing writer for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and is a media fellow at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and has also studied at Harvard Medical School. She lives in Minneapolis.