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Verweij is now the chief of medical microbiology at Radboud, heading a lab that tests the organisms infecting hospital patients in order to identify the best treatments. He works alongside Paul Verweij, another physician and microbiologist, whose Ph.D. Meis is a consultant at Canisius-Wilhelmina Hospital and has an appointment at Radboud University Medical Center these are side-by-side institutions, a hospital and a medical school, that attract patients from the entire Dutch southeast. The Mushroom Farmer Versus Drug-Resistant Superbugs Jesse Frost Some of their patients were sicker than they ought to be, but there was no clear connection to a cause. Many of the diseases that affect humans come from animals and wildlife and the landscapes they live in, and infectious-disease experts such as Meis spend a lot of their time drawing connections between their patients and the places where their illnesses might have come from.Ībout a decade ago, he and some of his colleagues faced a diagnostic puzzle. There is nowhere in the Netherlands that is remote from farming-the densely packed country produces more food for export than any other nation save the United States-and you cannot drive far out of town without finding yourself next to a pig farm or a field of forage crops or a tractor taking up both lanes. N ijmegen lies close to the German border, tucked against a river and folded into an agricultural landscape. We have missed the connection, they say, because we do not pay attention to things too close to notice: the crops in fields, the flowers in gardens, the soil under our feet. For the past decade, though, Meis and a small cadre of Dutch scientists have been building a case that one of our most commonly used classes of agricultural chemicals is simultaneously a profound health hazard. It seems implausible to me that a box on a garden-center shelf, available to anyone who cares to buy it, could have any significance for human health. And they use the four that we also use, because they work so well.” “Agriculture has almost 300 compounds they can use on fungi,” he tells me. He looks around at the brilliant flowers and bags of bulbs and taps the ingredient list again.
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“This is the same compound that we use in medicine,” he says. Eyeing the boxes, though, he looks solemn. Meis is a big man, almost a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered and bullet-headed with an exuberant laugh. “Tebuconazool,” he reads out in Dutch, and then switches to English for my benefit. Tapping the boxes gently, he shows me what we’ve come here to see. Meis reaches over my shoulder, chooses a spray to protect boxwood from mildew and another to chase black spot from roses, and rotates them sideways so we can see the ingredient lists. I squint at the plant names that have been rendered into Dutch. Wrapped in green and gold and aspirational images, organized by type of problem and method of application, the compounds stacked on the shelves are meant to keep these gorgeous plants healthy once they leave the nursery. Jacques Meis, a physician and microbiologist, is muscling past the greenery to a wall of agricultural chemicals at the back of the long store. My host has little patience for my garden dreams. My fingers tingle as I thread my way through stands of soaring bamboo, drifts of asters, and lanes of rhododendrons, tempted to grab a trowel and forget what I’m here for.
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T he glass-walled landscaping center on the road south of Nijmegen looks like a gardener’s dream of heaven.