Antibiotics in our food? How it happened with Maryn McKenna

The discovery of antibiotics hailed the dawn of a new era in medicine. Once fatal infections were suddenly treatable with the arrival of these magic bullet cures. This golden era is waning, however. Today, we face a rising crisis of antimicrobial resistance with more than 700,000 deaths per year across the globe due to now untreatable infections. The broad use of antibiotics in humans and agriculture has created the conditions for evolution of resistance among microbes. But, how did we get here? Why and when did antibiotics come to be so commonplace in agriculture? How did they come to be used as “growth promoters” in livestock rearing practices? In this episode, I speak with award winning author and journalist, Maryn McKenna, who has written extensively on the antibiotic resistance crisis. We take a deep dive into the history of how antibiotics became commonplace in agriculture and how this has impacted human health. About Maryn McKenna Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist and author, specializing in public health, global health, and food policy, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, where she teaches health and science writing and storytelling, and media literacy. She is the recipient of the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Award for magazine writing for her piece "The Plague Years" in The New Republic, and the author of the 2017 bestseller Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (National Geographic Books, Sept. 2017), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that prize. Big Chicken was named a Best Book of 2017 by Amazon, Science News, Smithsonian Magazine, Civil Eats, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Toronto Globe and Mail; an Essential Science Read by WIRED; and a 2018 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her 2015 TED Talk, "What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?", has been viewed 1.8 million times and translated into 34 languages. Her earlier books are Superbug (published in 2010), on the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph in hospitals, families and farms, which won the 2013 June Roth Memorial Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the 2011 Science in Society Award given by the National Association of Science Writers; and Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (published in 2004), the first history of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, for which she embedded with the corps for a year. Beating Back the Devil was named one of the Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. Maryn has presented at the United Nations, U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control about the need to curb antibiotic misuse in medicine and agriculture, and is a frequent public speaker and radio, TV and podcasts. About Cassandra Quave Prof. Cassandra Quave is best known for her ground-breaking research on the science of botanicals. Scientists in her research lab work to uncover some of nature’s deepest secrets as they search for new ways to fight life-threatening diseases, including antibiotic resistant infections. Working with a global network of scientists and healers, Cassandra and her team travel the world hunting for new plant ingredients, interviewing healers, and bringing plants back to the lab to study. Besides research, Cassandra is an award-winning teacher, and has developed and taught the college classes “Food, Health and Society” and “Botanical Medicine and Health” at Emory University. @QuaveEthnobot on Twitter @QuaveEthnobot on Instagram @QuaveMedicineWoman and “Foodie Pharmacology with Cassandra Quave” on Facebook