"For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden , unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected. Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support, and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in day care, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym. And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses — two million annually just in the United States — and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year."
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Non-fiction authors from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesWomen journalists from the United StatesScience authors from the United StatesInvestigative journalists
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Maryn McKenna
(born 1959) is an American journalist and science writer, specializing in , , and . After graduating with an A.B. from and an M.S. in journalism from , she worked as a newspaper reporter from 1985 to 2006. From 1995 to 2006 she was a science/medical writer for ' and was the world's only reporter assigned to full-time coverage of the . She has written for ', ', ', ', ', ', ', ', and '. She received the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences, the 20
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