Maryn McKenna at Brown Bag Lunch with a Journalist

 Brown Bag Lunch at the East Lake Public Library, 2727 E. Lake St., Minneapolis, with health journalist Maryn McKenna, author of "Superbug, the Fatal Menace of MRSA." (Actually, given the topic, you might want to eat your lunch before you come.)

Maryn has worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only U.S. reporter assigned to full-time coverage of the CDC, the Boston Herald, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Rockford Register-Star. She says her newsroom nickname was Scary Disease Girl.
About her book, Maryn says: "I was following a group of disease detectives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, through an investigation of bizarre skin infections in Los Angeles. The CDC wanted to know where men were picking them up. I wanted to know something more fundamental: How could a minor problem — something that the victims all described as looking like a tiny spider bite — blow up into massive infections that ate away at skin and muscle, put people into the hospital for weeks and drained their health and their bank accounts? Where had it come from? And if it could do that, what else was it capable of."
"Superbug, the Fatal Menace of MRSA" is my account of what I found when I tried to answer those questions:  a global epidemic, hiding in plain sight. It has been building for five decades. Every year, it kills thousands of people, sickens millions and costs billions of dollars. It affects hospitals and families, schools and prisons, children and seniors, and now, most troublingly, farms, livestock and food."


Maryn holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s with highest honors from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.She has won numerous journalism awards and held fellowships with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the East West Center, the Knight-Wallace Fellows of the University of Michigan, Harvard Medical School and the University of Maryland. She teaches science writing in the U.S. and Asia. Maryn lives in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and occasionally in Maine and France, and almost always has latex gloves and a face-mask somewhere close by.

The Twin Cities Media Alliance’s monthly Brown Bag Lunches are your chance for casual conversation with some of the Twin Cities’ most insightful journalists (and journalists from around the world) — about journalism, politics, or whatever is on your mind.