Superbugs Unplugged

Join Lance and Matt as they sit down with Dr. Laura Huber and Dr. Thomas Van Boeckle to discuss the findings of their recent paper, which looks at reductions in antibiotics in chickens in Canada and the impact on resistance in Salmonella, Campy and E coli. 

In this episode, co-hosts Dr. Lance B. Price and Lydia Palumbo sit down with Louise Francois Watkins from the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the CDC. They discuss antibiotic resistant campylobacter, and how it makes its way into our lives through our food and pets.

In this month's episode, co-host Dr. Lance B. Price talks with his former colleague and current friend, Dave Wagner, a plague expert at the Northern Arizona University. The two discuss plague, why it's still around. and the critical role antibiotics play in protecting the public .

Join Lance and Matt in this month’s episode, as they meet with Dr. Jeffery Klausner, a Clinical Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine at the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. We’ll explore the threat of drug-resistant gonorrhea, how it came to be, and how the flaws in our health system make it a daunting issue to solve.

In this episode, Maria Lettini, executive director of FAIRR, talks about their latest report: Feeding Resistance: Antimicrobial Stewardship in the Animal Health Industry. It's the first report to assess the animal health industry through the lens of antibiotic resistance and highlights the role that the sector can play in tackling the growing risk of resistance. Co-host Matt Wellington and Maria Lettini also discuss how this investor network raises awareness of the environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities brought about by industrial farming. 

This month’s episode focuses on the work of the Peggy Lillis Foundation established in 2010 by Christian and Liam Lillis after the untimely death of their mother to a C. diff (Clostridioides difficile) infection. Hosts Dr. Lance B. Price and Matthew Wellington interview Christian Lillis who serves as the foundation’s executive director. In this moving episode, you will hear about the loving and giving life of Peggy Lillis, her battle with the infection neither sibling had ever heard of, and how and why the brothers stood up the foundation in her name. 

 C. diff  is a Gram-positive, spore-forming bacterium or germ and is the most common cause of infectious diarrhea in healthcare settings. It causes nearly 500,000 infections and 29,000 deaths every year in the United States. The Peggy Lillis Foundation is building a nationwide C. diff awareness movement by educating the public, empowering advocates, and shaping policy. Learn more about the foundation's important work.

In March of 2020, the world's attention turned to one public health threat --- COVID-19. As we battled this horrific pandemic, rumors began circulating about the high rates of prescribing “just in case” antibiotics by health providers .   

These fears were confirmed in a recent study from The Pew Charitable Trusts that reviewed antibiotic use among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The findings strongly suggest significant overprescribing during the first six months of the pandemic. 

Dr. David Hyun, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor and Director of Pew’s Antibiotic Resistance Project joins hosts Matt Wellington and  Dr. Lance B. Price on the podcast to talk about the issue of antibiotic overprescription in human medicine. The conversation covers concerns about COVID-19’s impact on antibiotic resistance and renewed antibiotic stewardship efforts in human medicine. 

We spend a lot of time talking about antibiotic resistance, but lately, something else has caught our attention -- antifungal resistance! 

Thanks to the changing climate and increased fungicide use, a couple of nasty fungi have begun developing resistance genes that could make fungal infections in people untreatable. 

When did this happen? How bad is the threat? What are the solutions? As always, co-hosts Matt and Lance have lots of questions. Fortunately, Dr. Tom Chiller, Chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has lots of answers.  

Join us for an exciting conversation with the CDC about the wild world of fungi. 

This month on the podcast, two all-stars from Niman Ranch join Lance and Matt for a fantastic discussion on raising animals without the use of antibiotics. Chris Oliviero, the General Manager of Niman Ranch, and Ron Mardensen, an Iowa-based hog farmer and field agent for Niman Ranch, detail the benefits of a farming system that doesn’t overuse antibiotics. 

Meat production is the single largest purchaser of medically important antibiotics in the United States. Often these antibiotics are used to combat unsanitary or stressful factory farming conditions, rather than to treat verified illnesses. According to sales data from the past few years this number is trending in the wrong direction, which is bad news for keeping antibiotics effective. 

Niman Ranch has led the way in raising hogs, cattle, and lamb without the use of any antibiotics. Their secret to success? Let pigs be pigs! Plus they use a combination of fresh air, low stress environments, and the occasional essential oil to keep animals healthy. Here’s to hoping conventional producers are taking notes. 

You have heard of antibiotic overuse in food animal production, but wait until you get a load of spraying antibiotics on citrus trees.

In the United States, the use of medically important antibiotics on crops has more than quadrupled from 2000 to 2017 and the problem is only getting worse. The EPA recently greenlighted the potential spraying of more than 650,000 pounds of streptomycin, a critically important antibiotic, on citrus crops in Florida and California. This is bad news for antibiotic resistance. 

This month, Nathan Donley, a senior scientist from the Center for Biological Diversity, joins Dr. Lance B. Price and guest co-host, Sydney Riess, to discuss why antibiotics are being used in citrus in the first place and how the practice may be contributing to the antibiotic resistance crisis we are in. Maybe its just us, but air-blasting medically important antibiotics out the back of a pick-up truck all over citrus trees seems like a recipe for disaster. 

Ready to take action? Add your name to this petition urging the EPA to stop spraying medically important antibiotics on citrus crops: 

https://uspirg.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=43218

Author, journalist, and hard hitting disease detective Maryn McKenna has been reporting on bad bugs since long before it was cool. In this episode, Maryn joins Lance and Matt to explore intersections of viral, bacterial, and fungal infections in the era of COVID-19. 

Even in the midst of a pandemic, the U.S. livestock and agriculture industry continues to overuse antibiotics critical to human health. If we don’t course correct soon, we run the risk of losing these drugs for good. 

Maryn offers her take on antibiotic resistance and walks us through her career reporting on every aspect of the issue from factory farming to stubborn pharmaceutical marketplaces. She has been an influential voice on the topic for years, having authored two books on the subject Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA and Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats.

Consumption, the Captain of all these Men of Death, the White Plague, the King’s Evil -- all names for the bacterial infection known today as Tuberculosis or TB. 

In the early nineteenth century, TB was one of the most common killers American adults, but since entering the antibiotic era, this once deadly disease has faded into the background of American life. Unfortunately, our eagerness to forget our past has allowed TB to continue to affect low and middle income countries across the globe. 

Dr. Carole Mitnick, Sc.D, Professor of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School  reminds us that Tuberculosis, and super-resistant tuberculosis, kills around 1.4 million people globally each year.  Continuing to deprioritize this nasty bug will only come back to bite us. 

To our amateur historians out there, give us a shout in the comments if you can figure out what turned Lance’s Aunt Navis blue. 

On this episode, co-hosts Matthew Wellington and Lance B. Price, interview Dr. Evgeni Sokurenko, MD, PhD., a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington and the Founder and Chairman of the Board at ID Genomics, Inc. Dr. Sokurenko’s work focuses on mechanisms of molecular adaptive evolution of genes in bacterial pathogens such as E. coli. In this episode, you will learn about the binding mechanisms that allow E. coli to attach to human tissues to cause urinary tract infections, mutations that allow E. coli to become more pathogenic, and overall implications that such mutations have on antibiotic resistance and the treatability of bacterial infections. 

This month our Pod takes on a new format. We decided to air the panel discussion organized by our podcast co-host, U.S. PIRG, titled: Antibiotics in Agriculture: Preventing the Next Pandemic. It was an hour-long, virtual event co-sponsored by Harvard Law School that featured a host of experts from a variety of fields including infectious disease, business, market investment, advocacy, and journalism. It was held on November 18 -- the first day of World Antibiotic Awareness Week. A great way to start this important week! We really hope you enjoy it.

On this episode, co-hosts, Matthew Wellington and Lance B. Price, along with U.S. PIRG’s Sydney Riess, interview Matt Kuhn, DVM, PhD, a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of Defense. Dr. Kuhn’s expertise lies in dairy medicine, and his work has focused on the prevention of disease and the reduction of antibiotic use in cattle. In this episode, you will learn about the various challenges that farmers and veterinarians face with regards to antibiotic use on farms as well as the steps that both scientists and policymakers can take in order to effectively tackle antibiotic misuse and overuse. 

On this episode, co-host, Matthew Wellington, interviews Dr. Sameer Patel, pediatric infectious disease physician and Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. In this episode, they discuss what it means to be an advocate and a health professional, and you will learn about Dr. Patel's experience working on health policy advocacy as a health professional and its importance especially in today's health climate. 
 
 

On this episode, co-host, Matthew Wellington, interviews Dr. David Wallinga, Senior Health Advisor at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Dr. Wallinga is a physician with over 20 years of experience working on policy and advocacy, and his current work focuses on antibiotic overuse in U.S. livestock production. In this episode, they discuss Better Burgers: Why It's High Time the U.S. Beef Industry Kicked It's Antibiotic Habit, a report from the NRDC that analyzes antibiotic overuse in the U.S. beef industry and its relationship to antibiotic-resistant bacteria and its negative impact on human health.

On this episode, co-hosts Lance B. Price and Matthew Wellington are back "together apart" (socially distanced, of course!) to discuss parallels between COVID-19 and antibiotic resistance. The co-hosts look at antibiotic resistance through the lens of COVID-19 by diving into the themes of isolationism, individualism, a lack of a coordinated national response to address current public health issues, and over-dependence on vaccine/antibiotic development, all of which threaten our ability to effectively and efficiently address both issues. 

In this episode of Superbugs Unplugged, co-host, Dr. Lance Price, interviews Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at the Los Angeles + University of Southern California Medical Center and medical director of biosciences for Los Angeles county. Dr. Spellberg has over 16 years of experience working on national antibiotic policies related to use and development. Today, you’ll learn about Dr. Spellberg’s national public policy work, the current state of the antibiotic industry, and present-day society’s need for sustainable antibiotic development as it relates to antibiotic resistance. 

In this episode, co-host, Dr. Lance B. Price, interviews Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease professor in the division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on diseases of urban slums, in which antimicrobial resistance is an emerging issue, but it’s his ground breaking work on the origins of antibiotic-resistant E. coli that cause urinary tract infections that is the focus of this episode. You’ll learn about the various types of E. coli, where they are found, and how they can cause UTIs (including from food!) and develop antibiotic resistance that negatively impacts human health.