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Maryn McKenna

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Maryn McKenna (born 1959) is an American journalist and science writer, specializing in public health, global health, and food policy. After graduating with an A.B. from Georgetown University and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University, she worked as a newspaper reporter from 1985 to 2006. From 1995 to 2006 she was a science/medical writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was the world's only reporter assigned to full-time coverage of the CDC. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Scientific American, Nature, The Guardian, and Wired. She received the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences, the 2018 Science in Society Award for her book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, the 2019 John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, and the 2023 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.

Quotes

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  • We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections ... will kill people once again. In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again, because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance.
  • For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden epidemic, unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected. Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support, and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in day care, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym.
    And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses — two million annually just in the United States — and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year.
  • Which Came First: The Chicken Or Antibiotic Resistance?. Science Friday (September 7, 2017). (excerpt from Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna, pp, 24–25 of 1st edition ((isbn|1426217668}})
  • … most people read for some combination of intellectual enchantment and emotional identification. And the challenge for so many stories around AMR is the emotional identification. How do we find something to engage the reader’s, or viewer’s, emotion in such a way that they stick with us through the technical, didactic parts?
  • We give antibiotics to most of the meat animals on the planet on most days of their lives — and we don't give them those antibiotics because the animals are sick. We give them because, back in the 1950s, it was discovered that if you give tiny doses of antibiotics to animals — much too small to cure an infection — you will cause them to put on weight faster, which is an economic benefit to the farmer or the producer. And, then, a little while after that, it was discovered that if you gave a slightly larger dose — but still not enough to cure an infection ... what would technically be called a sub-therapeutic dose — you could protect animals from the diseases that spread in crowded barns and feedlots — those barns and feedlots becoming crowded because of this temptation to grow animals faster and faster. So that’s where we are today — all around the world.
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