Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna

Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA Reviews

• 
  Petra hiatus sort of exploring other net options

  I read quite a lot of this book before getting bogged down in gene variants of MRSA and thinking that a microbiologist might enjoy this but MRSA's a bit like bullets, doesn't matter the variation, they can all kill you. I did learn something interesting though - that it is an urban myth that MRSA is hospital-acquired. It's in the community, it's everywhere and it will generally either make you very sick, even sicker or you die.
  
  Thinking back to Atul Gawande's wonderful
  Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance I am reminded that the majority of germs in a hospital are not passed by nurses, visitors, sitting on toilets, touching the taps or anything like that. Nurses and visitors use the Purel and cleaners clean. Mostly. What they do not clean much is bedrails and doctors who touch you a lot don't tend to use Purel. Moral: keep wipes next to the bed and do the bedrails when the doctor's been if you didn't manage to get him to sanitise his hands.
  
  I have a step-niece. Her mother, my sister-in-law almost certainly has Munchausen's by Proxy. The niece was a fat cow. She was fat because she ate too much. I came in with her mother and my brother one day after visiting my mother in the hospice and there were three Wiener schnitzels and a huge amount of fries and a giant family-sized Cadbury's chocolate bar. We thought she had cooked for us. No, it was her supper. All of it. She was going to send out for pizza for us (and her).
  
  Anyway her mother persuaded her to eat even more so that on her 18th birthday she would be grossly obese and qualify for the weight loss surgery her somewhat bulimic/anorexic mother thought she should have. She persuaded the doctor who was young, handsome and I have to say, stupid (my mother convinced him that she was dying so she could go to a hospice - she didn't die for another 6 months and was thrown out of the hospice for bad behaviour) that her daughter had PCOS and that's why she was fat with bad periods and hairy and also something wrong with her joints that made them floppy so she couldn't exercise.
  
  So she got a gastric bypass and she got MRSA. She was very, very ill for a very long time. Her mother stopped inventing diseases for her children and husband now. Or at least physical ones. There is still the son with Crohn's and Tourette's (really) and all manner of co-morbid things she can think up to get attention but nothing more anyone gets hospitalised for.
  
  So MRSA cures and as well as kills. (Sick joke).
• 
  George Smith

  As a retired Clinical and Public Health Microbiologist, I can say that this writer knows the subject. So I can recommend this book. But the reader should be warned, this book is quite technical and very detailed, and really very disturbing. In this busy world, I think some important facts about MRSA and other "superbugs" can get lost in the detail. What facts? Well MRSA is not just a problem of sick people getting infected in hospitals, which was the case 15 years ago when I left the hospital lab. Today MRSA can be acquired by healthy people in the outside community. So MRSA is a problem of the whole community, not just the sick community. It has grown into a Public Health problem, and Public Health departments are being cut right and left. Another fact: Pharmaceutical companies are not looking for newer antimicrobials to use against MRSA or other superbugs that will pop up. Why not? No profit: Antimicrobials need to be used sparingly, and newer ones need to be kept in reserve, so there is no profit for developing new and better bullets to use against these threats. This author does a good job describing this situation and I think she is one of our finest journalists in the field of infectious disease. But I am less hopeful about the future of healthcare in my country after reading the book than I was before reading it. Despite so-called "reforms" the fact of life is that miracle-cures don't remain effective for long. This book shows how resistance to penicillin occurred soon after that miracle drug was developed, and methicillin-resistance followed soon later. Now we have vancomycin-resistance, etc. On and on. So don't depend on miracles for your healthcare. Act preventively. Handwashing helps. Staying out of crowds helps even more. Staying out of the hospital is really the biggest thing you can do to keep your health as long as possible, but sooner or later most of us will get sick and end up in the hospital. That is a fact of life. Hospital stays will increase. So will superbug infections. I Highly recommend this disturbing book!
• 
  Flora

  Pass the Purell, please. The article is written clearly and presents its facts very well, particularly regarding the evolution and research. I just got tired of reading how none of the patients had heard of MRSA when it's been out there for years. Granted, coverage has stepped up considerably since 2003, but it's a sad indicator of public ignorance on a significant health concern.
• 
  Donna

  MRSA = bad. Washing with Soap = good.
• 
  Baal Of

  The blurb on the cover below the title is a little bit hyped, but is probably responsibility of the publisher. The content of this book is technically detailed and thoroughly referenced. Despite the extensive accounts of specific cases and personal stories, the depth with which McKenna dives into the genetics and pharmacodynamics may be off-putting for some readers, but I loved it. It is distressing how much it seems that we may be moving towards a post-antibiotic era, something I've heard from multiple other medical expert sources, and it's interesting how much of that is driven by capitalistic free-market motives in both the medical and agricultural systems, as well as others. Profits do not necessarily lead to the best outcomes for either individual patients or society as a whole. This book also brings into sharp relief just how complicated biology is, and how tightly medicine interacts with society, politics, and just about everything. Beware people selling easy answers.
  
  Addendum: As one of my favorite podcasters (an actual infectious disease specialist) titled one of his episodes It's not a spider bite. I wish she had called that out a bit more, as spiders get a bad rap.
• 
  Max

  I read this book for an university course and because I worked in the hospital for six years I have some experience in treating patients who have a MRSA infection. MRSA is a bacterium that can be harmless in healthy people but can destroy people who are already weak and it's often found in hospitals. Bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics, but bacteria "evolve" and become resistent to antibiotics. MRSA is a bacterium who is resistant to almost all antibiotics and is very hard to get rid of.
  
  I was very excited to learn more about MRSA seeing as I only knew how to deal with it, but not what it exactly is. My curiousity started when I followed my first Microbiology course so now it kind of feels like my past life (hospital) is colliding with my current life (biology).
  
  Okay, about the book. It is very intense. It gives a lot of examples of infected patients, kids and even some animals. I think the author goes a little overboard with these. They're all basically the same. Patient gets ill, gets boils and ulcers and whatnot, ends up in intensive care and either dies or gets well. I can imagine this book giving people paranoia about bacteria. It's important that the author wrote this book though. She explains the various ways the MRSA bacteria can be transmitted, and it's not just hospitals. Everywhere where's skin contact and bad hygiene, MRSA can be a problem.
  
  If you're interested in MRSA, definately read this book. You need some basal knowledge of the bacterium to understand the full story. Be warned - it can be a little depressing and intense.
• 
  Stephen

  When she said "Why read books about microbes that can kill you?", I answered "This is the stuff of which drama is made: medical hero versus advancing death with too few weapons and too little logistical support."
  
  I do rather wish that the hucksters who name books and design book covers would be a bit more reserved than screaming "Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA." The only thing missing from this bright-red dust-cover is a man in a rubber monster suit (like "The Creature from the Black Lagoon") carrying a voluptuous nurse, who has fainted in fear, and whose uniform is slipping dangerously. Every sleeper needs a villain to fill up a nightmare: the Viet Cong, the walking dead, militant vegans. Who knew that a tiny bacterium called Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus would more than suffice? It is difficult to write about a bacterium which changes in response to challenges in its environment without personifying that organism; it is difficult not to use words which impute malice to microbes when their "behaviour" seems to arise from evil intent.
  
  Without becoming shrill, McKenna casts a disturbing light on (a) the shift from primarily hospital acquired MRSA to community acquired MRSA, (b) the lack of a national strategy to address the problem, (c) the insufficiency of public health agencies, crippled by budget cuts, to meet the challenge, and (d) the lack of economic motive to find new antibiotics to counter these bugs. Her academic credentials are excellent as is her use of the scientific literature to make her points. It is no wonder that she has won so many medical-professional awards for her writing. A second edition to add coverage of the six years since publication of the first would be welcome.
  
  When she said, "Doesn't it make you feel creepy to read stuff like that?", I answered "Frequent handwashing has been shown to be the best line of defense against MRSA. Isn't that interesting?"
  
  
  
• 
  Ed Yoo

  Good journalistic approach.
  
  The author writes this like a reporter, but the robust clinical understanding underpinned with good research and evidence makes this a scary but compelling read.
• 
  Frank

  Often, the books that frighten me the most aren't horror novels. Instead, I'm more likely to be disturbed after reading texts detailing real-life threats, especially dangers that are under reported and not taken seriously.
  
  So it's probably no surprise that Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA scared the hell out of me. As the text's title indicates, Superbug is all about MRSA, a bacterium responsible for a range of difficult-to-treat infections. MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus but is commonly labeled as staph, or, more appropriately, drug-resistant staph. It is especially dangerous because is has developed resistance to many antibiotic drugs that are normally used to counter bacterial infections. In this sense, MRSA has become more drug-resistant in part because of our societal overuse of antibiotics.
  
  There are a variety of strains and manifestations of MRSA, from minor skin infections to severe necrotizing or flesh bacteria syndrome. The fear with MRSA, as author Maryn McKenna conveys, is that we may be approaching a MRSA strain, or superbug, that's untreatable.
  
  The book doesn't offer much consolation or conclude with a silver bullet that's on its way to defeat MRSA, although the author does touch on some of the current research exploring MRSA vaccines and mentions some of the tactics used in preventive MRSA screening.
  
  As a reading experience, Superbug was accessible and well-paced. The author smartly alternated between true stories of people with MRSA to more technical passages that delved into the history and science behind the bug. There were some spots that were a little too esoteric for me, but, overall, Maryn McKenna is a fluid and accomplished writer and I learned a lot.
  
  In a media-saturated age that can't wait to report about the next pandemic, sometimes it's hard to know which looming diseases to take seriously. When I mentioned I was reading Superbug to a friend, he questioned the threat of MRSA and contended that, if it was so serious, I should probably know some people who had MRSA. I considered the claim but disputed the logic. I personally don't know anyone with HIV or Juvenile Diabetes, but that doesn't mean those conditions aren't serious. Ultimately, I think the facts and cases Maryn McKenna presents in Superbug speak for themselves, and we need to take MRSA seriously.
• 
  Atar

  MRSA and this book seriously scares me. And it should you. I have had this bacteria before and it was extremely painful. As luck would have it mine was only a skin infection. Lanced and treated with basic antibiotics it went away without too many complications. However there are many different ways MRSA can debilitate and or destroy ones family and life. If you want to protect your kids, parents, siblings and yourself I fiercely suggest reading this book. Before I started reading it I thought that it was probably going to be a long and boring read filled with too many unrelatable facts, studies, and medical jargon. All of which are included but what really made it a great read are the personable stories of the effects MRSA had on people and their families. Some of them are very disturbing but you won’t want to put the book down. This book is fantastic and I recommend it to all.
• 
  Megan

  Well that was terrifying. Interesting, and informative. Nice mix of anecdote with hard data and numbers. I found it fairly easy to follow, but I do have a strong science background so YMMV. But yeah. Terrifying.
• 
  Daniel Hooker

  Lost patience with the endless streams of dying patients and ICU nightmares. Definitely not a book for the faint of heart, or for those who are not willing to read wound sizes compared to everyday objects repeatedly (ie hole in abdomen size of a melon, bump on shoulder swelling to size of soup can, hole in egg-sized wound the size of a quarter, etc.)
  
  Written by a journalist who certainly knows her stuff, this account of the underreported MRSA is important in some ways; it calls attention to a deadly and difficult condition that requires quick action. ER doctors certainly need to be aware that MRSA is no longer just a hospital-acquired infection, and be equipped to handle patients that need immediate and specialized care. But I can't help thinking that the ways in which these stories are relayed will only create patient paranoia, and physician exasperation.
• 
  Tara

  
  
  i found Superbug to be a hell of a good and utterly terrifying read. Reads not entirely unlike a Crichton or Grisham (for those of us who unabashedly like our guilty pleasures) but instead of pure fluff it's packed with references and footnotes to prove up McKenna's assertions and research chops. For all it's page-turningness, the book isn't at all hyperbolic; for the immense sinking feeling it's left me in the pit of my stomach, it isn't not at all hysterical or sky-is-falling. I highly recommend this for both those in the medical/healthcare field as well as those not at all.
  
  I could only wish/hope that awareness of drug-resistant bugs would spread as fast to the masses as the bugs themselves are. And wish that this was just a cheap paperback thriller instead of nonfiction.
• 
  보미

  The author really didn't offer many solutions in how to contain MRSA; also, the book was grossly repetitive. It read like a horror book of patient after patient in the ICU or ER suffering from a panoply of MRSA symptoms. I wanted to learn more about solutions and the dire implications MRSA can have in the future for humans and animals. I had to skim all the passages that related to human suffering--there was just too many. At least 80 pages could have been shaved off and the intent of the book would still hold the same message.
• 
  Susan

  Great book which details the rising epidemic of MRSA infection within the US (and globally) through the personal experiences of doctors/researchers and patient accounts. Not heavily science-oriented, but gives you enough background to understand the importance and difference between the different MRSA strains and the areas in which anti-bacterial resistance emerges, as well as suggestions for how to counter the rising spread of MRSA and the diminishing number of methods to treat it.
• 
  Roger

  Excellent reporting on an important medical topic. McKenna's book gives a fascinating description of the increasing resistance of Staph variants to the main tools that medicine has for fighting infections. She wove a number of stories through the book in a way that kept me interested. I do believe that I got itchy a number of times while reading parts of it. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in medical science.
• 
  Jinyan Zhang

  MRSA is little known to people who are not well-versed in medical jargon but yet has wrecked havoc into so many people's lives. It lives around and among us, slowly creeping out into the society and threatening to release a full-blown pandemic with our continuous misuse of antibiotics. A fantastic narration of how the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 has led to the evolution of multi-resistant bacteria that continues to plague the society up till this day.
• 
  Scott Cole

  Spoiler alert... it's MRSA.
  
  The setup and premise of this book is neat; an anecdotal story about a person getting sick and then an explanation from what doctors were trying to do at the time. The problem is that the stories are just too short and the lack of character development makes me not care... also since it is a book about MRSA, it is tough to be surprised each time you learn the character has MRSA.
• 
  Pancha

  This was a fascinating book, with lots of case studies and interviews with people who have survived MRSA infections and the families of people who have not. In a way it is terrifying, but on the other hand it recounts how hospitals and researchers are dealing with the threat.
• 
  Valley Cottage Library

  SUMMER READING CLUB: "Excellent book on community acquired MRSA- Methicillin Resistant Staph A. Scary look into what ma continue to wreak havoc on our health, particularly children, and how it's been kept quiet."
• 
  Julie

  Terrifying
  
  Well-written, yet terrifying play by play account of how MRSA has infiltrated our hospitals and communities...this book is a fast read, but leaves many questions unanswered. The true terror is that is due to the fact that, as of now, there are no answers.