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Maryn McKenna | |
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Occupation(s) | author, journalist |
Years active | since 1985 |
Notable work |
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Maryn McKenna is an American author and journalist. She has written for Nature , National Geographic , and Scientific American , and spoke on antibiotics at TED 2015. [1]
In 2009, McKenna received a Dart Center Ochberg Fellowship from The Journalism School at Columbia University. [2] In 2012, she was awarded an Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowship at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. [3] In 2013, she joined the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a Fellowship. [4]
McKenna has written for Nature, [5] Scientific American , Wired and the National Geographic, [3] and has been a staff reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer , the Boston Herald and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution . [6]
Her book Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service is about the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [7] Her book Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA is about methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; [8] a review on the CDC website called it "an extensively researched and detailed review". [9]
Her article "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future" is included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014. [10]
McKenna received a Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences in 2013, and a Leadership Award from the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics in 2014. [13]
A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.
Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive spherically shaped bacterium, a member of the Bacillota, and is a usual member of the microbiota of the body, frequently found in the upper respiratory tract and on the skin. It is often positive for catalase and nitrate reduction and is a facultative anaerobe that can grow without the need for oxygen. Although S. aureus usually acts as a commensal of the human microbiota, it can also become an opportunistic pathogen, being a common cause of skin infections including abscesses, respiratory infections such as sinusitis, and food poisoning. Pathogenic strains often promote infections by producing virulence factors such as potent protein toxins, and the expression of a cell-surface protein that binds and inactivates antibodies. S. aureus is one of the leading pathogens for deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains, such as methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), is a worldwide problem in clinical medicine. Despite much research and development, no vaccine for S. aureus has been approved.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a group of gram-positive bacteria that are genetically distinct from other strains of Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. It caused more than 100,000 deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance in 2019.
The Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) is a non-profit organization founded in 1981 by Stuart B. Levy (1938–2019), Professor of Medicine at Tufts University and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. APUA's mission is to strengthen society's defenses against infectious disease by promoting appropriate access and use to antimicrobial agents and controlling antimicrobial resistance on a worldwide basis. APUA has a network of affiliated chapters in over 50 countries, and conducts applied antimicrobial resistance research, education, capacity building and advocacy at the global and grassroots levels.
Martin J. Blaser is the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers (NJ) Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.
Frank Ochberg, is a psychiatrist, a pioneer in trauma science, an educator and the editor of the first text on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He is one of the founding fathers of modern psychotraumatology and served on the committee that defined PTSD. He is a graduate of Harvard and of Johns Hopkins Medical School.
Tara Shannon McKelvey is an American journalist who is a White House reporter for the BBC and a former correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She has reported on topics which include national-security issues from the Middle East, South Asia and Russia.
The Science in Society Journalism Awards are awards created by the American National Association of Science Writers (NASW) to honor and encourage "outstanding investigative and interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact for good and ill." Each year the NASW recognizes work in these categories: books, periodicals, and electronic media. Each winner receives $2,500. The first award was given in 1972. The Awards recognize not only reporting about science, but also thoughtful work that probes the ethical problems and social effects of science. The awards are considered especially prestigious because they are judged by accomplished peers. Starting in 2009 the award categories were changed. The book category will remain unchanged, while the other categories will morph into "Commentary and Opinion", "Science Reporting", and "Local Science Reporting". Except for the Book category, the awards will be platform independent, which means that they may be magazine, radio, TV, or web-based.
The mobilized colistin resistance (mcr) gene confers plasmid-mediated resistance to colistin, one of a number of last-resort antibiotics for treating Gram-negative infections. mcr-1, the original variant, is capable of horizontal transfer between different strains of a bacterial species. After discovery in November 2015 in E. coli from a pig in China it has been found in Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterobacter aerogenes, and Enterobacter cloacae. As of 2017, it has been detected in more than 30 countries on 5 continents in less than a year.
Kevin Outterson is a lawyer, a professor of law and the N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health and Disability Law at Boston University (2014–present). He is also the founding executive director and principal investigator of Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, a global non-profit partnership that supports companies developing new antibiotics, diagnostics, vaccines and other products to address drug-resistant bacterial infections. CARB-X is funded by the United States, United Kingdom and German governments, Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2022, CARB-X received a new commitment of funding from BARDA and Wellcome of up to $370 million. The G7 Health Ministers have cited CARB-X among the critical initiatives to support as the G7 governments renew their 2021 commitment to address the most dangerous drug-resistant infections.
The side effects of penicillin are bodily responses to penicillin and closely related antibiotics that do not relate directly to its effect on bacteria. A side effect is an effect that is not intended with normal dosing. Some of these reactions are visible and some occur in the body's organs or blood. Penicillins are a widely used group of medications that are effective for the treatment of a wide variety of bacterial infections in human adults and children as well as other species. Some side effects are predictable, of which some are common but not serious, some are uncommon and serious and others are rare. The route of administration of penicillin can have an effect on the development of side effects. An example of this is irritation and inflammation that develops at a peripheral infusion site when penicillin is administered intravenously. In addition, penicillin is available in different forms. There are different penicillin medications as well as a number of β-lactam antibiotics derived from penicillin.
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Tara C. Smith is an American epidemiologist and science communicator. She is a professor at the Kent State University College of Public Health who studies zoonotic infections. Smith was the first to identify strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus associated with livestock in the United States.
Dale Andrew Fisher FRACP is an Australian physician who specialises in Infectious Diseases and is a Senior Consultant in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the National University Hospital, Singapore. He is also a professor of medicine at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, the chair of the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee through the Ministry of Health, Singapore, and chair of the steering committee of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network hosted by the World Health Organization.
Seema Yasmin is a British-American physician, writer and science communicator based at Stanford University. She is Director of Research and Education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin helped to debunk myths about the coronavirus.
Amy Dockser Marcus is an American journalist and author of three books. As a staff reporter for the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal, Dockser Marcus won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.
The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. The MIT Jameel Clinic also supports the commercialization of solutions through grant funding, and has partnered with pharmaceutical companies, like Takeda and Sanofi, to forge collaborations between research and development functions and MIT researchers.
Kerry L. LaPlante is an American pharmacist, academic and researcher. She is a Professor of Pharmacy and the Chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Rhode Island, an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University, an Infectious Diseases Pharmacotherapy Specialist, and the Director of the Rhode Island Infectious Diseases Fellowship and Research Programs at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence, Rhode Island.