Wired hires McKenna as a senior writer

Wired magazine has hired Maryn McKenna as a senior writer for health, covering all aspects of public health, global health, medicine and disease.

She previously has been working part-time at the magazine covering COVID-19 stories.

As a newspaper reporter, she 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.

She reported from the Indian Ocean tsunami and from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Arctic, and embedded with CDC teams on Capitol Hill during the 2001 anthrax attacks and with a World Health Organization polio-eradication team in India.

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, Sept. 2017), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that prize.

Big Chicken was named a Best Book of 2017 by Amazon, Science News, Smithsonian Magazine, Civil Eats, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Toronto Globe and Mail; an Essential Science Read by WIRED; and a 2018 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her 2015 TED Talk, “What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?“, has been viewed 1.8 million times and translated into 34 languages.