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The Fatal Menace of MRSA
Free Press
March 2010
On Sale: March 23, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 141655727X
EAN: 9781416557272
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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."
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