McKenna among the Wired layoffs

Wired magazine senior writer Maryn McKenna, who has been covering public health, global health, medicine and disease, was among the layoffs this week.

“I expect to return to freelancing, and maybe widen my scope to consulting and beyond,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

McKenna previously worked for 10 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald, where stories she co-wrote on illnesses among veterans of the first Persian Gulf War led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her stories on the association between local cancer clusters and contamination escaping a federal nuclear weapons plant contributed to a successful nuclear-harm lawsuit by residents.

She was also previously a staff member at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota.

She is the recipient of the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Award for magazine writing for her piece “The Plague Years” in The New Republic, and the author of the 2017 bestseller “Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats” (National Geographic Books), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that prize.