# 2421
Maryn McKenna, whose writes (among other things) a blog on MRSA called Superbug, is reporting from the ICAAC Meeting underway this weekend.
She has already filed two reports today, and I would expect more updates today or tomorrow.
Breaking MRSA news from the ICAAC meeting 1
There are 15,000+ people at the 48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemistry (known as ICAAC - yes, "Ick-ack") and 46th Infectious Diseases Society of America Annual Meeting, and at least half of them seem interested in MRSA. At the keynote address last night, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, referred to MRSA as a "global pandemic."
ST 398 in New York City - via the Dominican Republic?
Here's a piece of MRSA news from the ICAAC meeting (see the post just below) that is intriguing enough to deserve its own post.
US and Caribbean researchers have found preliminary evidence of the staph strain ST 398, the animal-origin strain that has caused human illness in the Netherlands and has recently been found in Ontario and Iowa, in Manhattan. How it may have arrived: Via the Dominican Republic.
Maryn is the author of Beating Back The Devil, the story of the disease detectives at the CDC, and is a frequent contributor to CIDRAP. She wrote the award winning 7-part series called The Pandemic Vaccine Puzzle last year.
Maryn is now working on her next book, SUPERBUG: The Rise of Drug-Resistant Staph and the Danger of a World Without Antibiotics, coming in 2009 from Free Press.
Her blog, Superbug, serves as a virtual whiteboard for her research on this project.
Highly recommended.
