Read this: Superbug
Superbug is not about an entomological caped crusader.
It’s more like a grown-up version of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
The bug in question is MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that kills more Americans every year than AIDS. Superbug is the story of how we created our own monster-under-the-bed, how it spreads through hospitals and communities, and why it’s damn near impossible to control. If you have a cut or a pimple while reading this book, you are pretty much guaranteed to freak yourself out. And I mean that in the best possible way.
MRSA is the pumped-up version of a
ridiculously common bacteria. One in three of us carts around
Staphylococcus aureus on our skin or up
our noses without ever noticing a difference. It never was
benign—S. aureus is still the most common
hospital-acquired infection in the U.S., and it can cause
everything from rashes to toxic shock syndrome. But S. aureus
mostly attacks the weak, people whose immune systems are too
sick or too old to hold it in check.
MRSA
throws all that out the window. The issue with MRSA isn’t
just its resistance to antibiotics. It’s
that it attacks the healthy, as well as the sick. And that it
can kill the healthy, too.
I was used to
hearing about MRSA mostly in the context of hospital-acquired
infections. Superbug disabused me of that
notion. MRSA may have first been noticed in hospitals, but it
can come from the playground as easily as the emergency room,
and it’s actually gotten to the point where community-acquired
and hospital-acquired strains cross into each other’s territory
often enough that researchers aren’t sure such clear-cut
categories even make sense anymore.
Written
by journalist Maryn McKenna—a “Scary Disease Girl”
who used to cover the CDC for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution—Superbug
does a great job of explaining how hospital- and
community-acquired MRSA evolved, and how they’ve intertwined
with our modern way of life, from the doctor’s office to the
dinner table. Like any in-depth discussion of bacterial
genetics, it does occasionally get mired down in acronym soup,
but McKenna handles it well, reminding the reader at the right
times what that concept from a few chapters ago
means—and managing to do so in a way that doesn’t
feel textbook-y.
The book doesn’t offer easy
answers, because, frankly, there are none at this point. There
are search-and-destroy policies that seem to be able to keep
MRSA in check in hospitals, but they’re expensive and difficult
to employ in the United States, where MRSA rates are only
voluntarily reported and enforcement of sanitary rules varies
widely from hospital to hospital. (Countries with socialized
medicine—and the standardized policies and
consolidated medical records that come with it—have
had better luck.)
The important thing here
is awareness, and not just of the fact that MRSA exists. That
does matter—particularly for doctors who don’t always
recognize what they’re dealing with fast enough—but
from an Average Person standpoint there are plenty of scary
diseases in the world and you’d go nuts if spent too much time
worrying about them all. Instead,
Superbug‘s importance lies in making us
aware of how daily choices in familiar places influence the
evolution and spread of disease.
When I was
14, I read a book called The
Coming Plague that sparked my interest in
the stories of science. Its big question: “Where will the next
major epidemic come from?” I remember that book being full of
locations I thought of as exotic. (Though, to be fair, from my
position in central Kansas, “exotic” meant just about anywhere
else.) Combine that with reading The
Hot Zone around the same time period, and
small me was left with the idea that disastrous diseases were
things that rose up out of the evolutionary ether in some dark
corner of the globe, and swooped in on unsuspecting Americans
via international travel or disgruntled research
monkeys.
Superbug
starts in Chicago.
Where will the next major
epidemic come from? According to Superbug,
that epidemic is already here. It grew out of our hospitals,
our prisons and our high-school locker rooms. We fed it with
our demand for antibiotic ointments, prescriptions we didn’t
need and factory-farmed cows packed together and pumped full of
their own antibiotics. We spread it with unwashed hands. The
story of MRSA is more prosaic than tales of tracking Ebola
through the African jungle, but that’s exactly what makes it
terrifying, and fascinating.
Buy Superbug
Read the Superbug
blog
Disclaimer: I received a free
review copy of this book from author Maryn McKenna, who I
personally know. That said, I receive a lot of free review
copies of books. I only tell you about the ones I think you
really need to read.
Image of MRSA growing in
culture courtesy Flickr user Simon
Goldenberg, via CC.