Superbug Quotes

“Food animals also get antibiotics for “growth promotion,” a metabolically mysterious process that has made possible the entire high-volume, low-margin business of industrial-scale farming. Since the 1950s, when two pharma company scientists discovered that feeding chicks the waste products from drug manufacturing made them put on weight much faster, many U.S. farmers have been giving tiny doses of antibiotics to cattle, swine, and poultry.34”
― Maryn McKenna, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA

“Still, on average, 97 percent of the MRSA isolates were USA300. In addition, 74 percent of them were a single identical strain, dubbed USA300–0114. For a bacterium that usually was extraordinarily diverse, this was unheard-of.11”
― Maryn McKenna, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA

“Jails and prisons are unique medical ecosystems. Many of the people who end up there are already in shaky health from drug use, marginal living conditions, or poverty. Plus, the conditions inside jails and prisons—crowded, with little access to health care—exacerbate the spread of infection.”
― Maryn McKenna, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA

“Staph colonization is remarkable. There is no other disease-causing bacterium that is carried, without causing infection, by such a substantial slice of the population. The”
― Maryn McKenna, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA