Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA »

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.

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."

Kirkus Reviews

A gripping account of one of the most devastating infectious agents on the planet. MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was once considered the exclusive bane of hospitalized patients, who were already weakened by disease or surgery, and hence prey to any infectious organism able to survive and adapt to the array of disease-fighting drugs used in health-care settings. Methicillin is an antibiotic that was first hailed as the successor to penicillin, designed to dispatch the bugs that had grown resistant to the first antibiotic. And so it did-until the bugs outwitted it. In time, strains of MRSA appeared not only in sick patients, but also in healthy people who had never been near a hospital. Science journalist McKenna (Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, 2004) writes that the first reports of community-based MRSA were scoffed at by the medical profession. The doctors assumed that the community patients had acquired infection from a bug that had escaped from the hospital. The strains were different, however, and so was their profile of drug resistance. McKenna traces a 50-year history of antibiotic-drug development and drug resistance, coming to the dismal conclusion that it's a war we are losing. MRSA infections now kill nearly 20,000 Americans each year, and an estimated 4.4 million are colonized with the bug. Compounding the problem are the difficulties in hospital infection control-just getting staff to wash their hands between patients has proven a formidable hurdle. Testing all hospital admissions and isolating carriers has been effective, but the process is costly and comes with its ownside effects-patients are left alone and have fewer check-ups by a staff that requires new gloves and gowns each time. Big Pharma has not helped, since companies see greater profit in drugs for chronic diseases. McKenna suggests that vaccines might be the answer, but it seems a distant hope-and too late for the patients whose heartbreaking stories she tells. A meticulously researched, frightening report on a deadly pathogen. Agent: Susan Raihofer/David Black Literary Agency

1 The First Alert 1

2 The Cloud Babies 19

3 The Silent Attack 35

4 The Puzzle Pieces 50

5 The Biggest Thing Since AIDS 64

6 The Flood Rising 79

7 Gone Without Warning 94

8 The Foe on the Field 110

9 Prison, the Perfect Incubator 125

10 Into the Food Chain 140

11 Soap, the Wonder Cure 157

12 The End of Antibiotics 175

13 The Epidemics Converging 195

Epilogue 211

Appendix 213

Note on Sources and Acknowledgments 217

Notes 223

Index 255