Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2000

SUSAN OKIE TAKES TOP HONORS IN MICROBIOLOGY SOCIETY AWARDS COMPETITION

Susan Okie PHOTO BY THE WASHINGTON POST

NASW member Susan Okie, medical reporter at the Washington Post, has been named recipient of the 2000 American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Public Communications Award. Her winning entry, "Science Races to Stem TB's Threat" and "TB Fights Back," a two-part series on tuberculosis, contrasts the advances made toward eliminating tuberculosis with the current worldwide resurgence of the disease. The articles illustrate just how difficult it is to control microbes despite all of the past century's medical advances.

Beginning her report in New York City, Okie followed public-health workers as they struggled to keep drug-resistant tuberculosis under control. She interviewed experts about the complex scientific, social, economic, and political difficulties involved in such an undertaking and describes how the tuberculosis bacterium mutates and evolves to remain a major public health threat.

"Okie realized that the battle against tuberculosis provided the perfect opportunity to show how far medicine has come in combating pathogenic agents as well as the limits of modern science in fighting age-old scourges at the dawn of a new century," said Washington Post Science Editor Rob Stein, who nominated her for the award.

A native of Los Angeles, Okie has been reporting for the Post since 1979. She was the paper's science editor from 1994 to 1996, and currently covers medicine on the national staff. Trained as a physician, Okie completed her residency at the University of Connecticut Medical School in Farmington in 1983, and served on the faculty there until 1985.

The ASM Public Communications Award recognizes outstanding achievement in increasing public awareness, knowledge, and understanding of microbiology. The award carries an honorarium of $2,500 plus expenses to attend ASM's general meeting.

Runner-up awardees in this year's competition were NASW members Charles Petit and Laura Tangley of U.S. News and World Report for their story "The Invisible Emperors," about the expanding field of microbial research, and Ellen Licking of Business Week for her report on biofilms, entitled "Getting a Grip on Bacterial Slime."

(Source: ASM news release)