Lurking in our homes, hospitals, schools, and farms is a terrifying pathogen that has been evolving faster than the medical community can track it or drug developers can create antibiotics to quell it. The pathogen is MRSA — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — and SUPERBUG is the first book to tell its intricate, threatening, fascinating story.

Doctors long thought that MRSA was confined to healthcare institutions, infecting almost exclusively those who were already ill, immune-compromised or old, and flaring up only occasionally in the outside world. But through remarkable reporting that covers 50 years of medicine, microbiology and tragedy, acclaimed science journalist Maryn McKenna reveals the hidden history of MRSA’s relentless advance across the planet: overwhelming hospitals, tearing open families, infiltrating agriculture and moving inexorably into the food chain.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and more than 1,000 scientific publications dating back to the 1950s, McKenna traces the resistant bug’s stealthy path through the decades, from an accident victim in a British hospital to a cluster of healthy children made desperately ill in the American Midwest and to a stubborn case of bacterial carriage in a Dutch farmer’s child that reveals a chain of transmission stretching across borders, species and oceans.

With the sensitivity of a novelist and the skill of a disease detective, she portrays the emotional and financial devastation endured over years by victims of hospital MRSA, and the shock and grief of parents whose healthy children were felled in hours by an undetected community strain. She takes readers into medical centers where frustrated physicians are forced to discard drug after drug, and into labs where researchers struggle for the molecular secrets that will allow new drugs to work — for a while. She uncovers the unheard warnings that predicted the current crisis, and she indicts the social and political neglect that allowed it to occur: misplaced government spending, inadequate public health surveillance, misguided agricultural practices and vast overuse of the few precious drugs we have left. And in the very newest research findings, she uncovers some hope, some tools for self-defense — and almost no margin for error.

In SUPERBUG, McKenna demonstrates that MRSA is not one patient’s misfortune or one family’s tragedy. It is a global emergency of successive epidemics in hospitals, communities, and farms, and successive failures in governments, medicine and the marketplace. It touches almost every aspect of modern life. It is, as one weary researcher tells her, “the biggest thing since AIDS.”

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