Superbugs Unplugged

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 gi...

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...

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,...

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 pu...

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 criticall...

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 heal...

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 forge...

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 bind...

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 journali...

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...

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 po...

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....

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 heal...

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. Spellbe...

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 c...

In this episode, co-host, Dr. Lance B. Price interviews longtime friend, colleague, and microbiologist, Jay Graham, who is an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Dr. Graham is an expert in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and has been working to improve WASH in underdeveloped communities for more than 20 years. Today, you'll learn about Dr. Graham's recen...

On this episode, co-hosts Lance B. Price from the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center and Matt Wellington from US PIRG dig into an annual report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that summarizes sales of antibiotics used in U.S. food animal production. The co-hosts explain both the significance and limitations of the report, which showed a nearly 10% increase in antibiotics sold for food...

On this episode, we are taking a closer look at the extremely real, human threat of antibiotic resistant infections, and discussing how momentum for beating these harmful bugs can start from just one person with a determination to find a solution. Co-host Matthew Wellington from U.S. PIRG interviewed Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, co-author of the book The Perfect Predator - A Scientist’s Race to Save H...

This week, Dr. Lance Price and Matthew Wellington welcome listeners to the inaugural episode of their podcast and explain a bit about themselves, their respective organizations, and the rationale that sparked the creation of Superbugs Unplugged. You’ll learn about the growing dangers of drug-resistant infections and how the overuse of antibiotics in human medicine, food animal production and plant...