Bacteria are Coming for Your OJ #534
September 13, 2019
What makes breakfast, breakfast? Well, according to every movie and TV show we've ever seen, a big glass of orange juice is basically required. But our morning grapefruit might be in danger. Why? Citrus greening, a bacteria carried by a bug, has infected 90% of the citrus groves in Florida. It's coming for your OJ. We'll talk with University of Maryland plant virologist Anne Simon about ways to stop the citrus killer, and with science writer and journalist Maryn McKenna about why throwing antibiotics at the problem is probably not the solution.
Related links:
- A Review of the Citrus Greening Research and Development Efforts Supported by the Citrus Research and Development Foundation on The National Academies Press
- Antibiotics set to flood Florida’s troubled orange orchards by Maryn McKenna on Nature
- Spraying diseased citrus orchards with antibiotics could backfire by Maryn McKenna on Nature
Guests:
- Maryn McKenna
- Anne Simon
Guest Bios
Maryn McKenna
Maryn McKenna is a senior writer at WIRED covering health, public health and medicine, including the Covid pandemic, and a faculty member at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health. Before coming to WIRED she freelanced for magazines in the US and Europe including Scientific American, Smithsonian, The New Republic, the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic. She graduated from Georgetown University, earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and was a Knight journalism fellow at University of Michigan and MIT. She is the author of "Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats.", "Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA", and "Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service".
Anne Simon
Anne Simon is a professor at the University of Maryland. Her lab studies the structure and function of RNA elements involved in cap-independent translation of plus-strand RNA viruses. She also was a consultant on The X-Files, including an episode on CRISPR.
