Tag: antibiotics
U.S. Sees First Case Of Bacteria Resistant To All Antibiotics

U.S. Sees First Case Of Bacteria Resistant To All Antibiotics

By Ransdell Pierson and Bill Berkrot

U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to all known antibiotics, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not travelled within the prior five months.

Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the infection was not controlled even by colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”

The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.

“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”

The patient visited a clinic on April 26 with symptoms of a urinary tract infection, according to the study, which did not describe her current condition. Authors of the study could not immediately be reached for comment.

The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.

“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.

 

“MEDICINE CABINET IS EMPTY FOR SOME”

In the United States, antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually.

The mcr-1 gene was found last year in people and pigs in China, raising alarm.

The potential for the superbug to spread from animals to people is a major concern, Cassell said.

For now, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from it and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.

Experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.

Frieden said the need for new antibiotics is one of the more urgent health problems, as bugs become more and more resistant to current treatments. “The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are,” Frieden added. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients. It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.”

Overprescribing of antibiotics by physicians and in hospitals and their extensive use in food livestock have contributed to the crisis. More than half of all hospitalized patients will get an antibiotic at some point during their stay. But studies have shown that 30 percent to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed in hospitals are unnecessary or incorrect, contributing to antibiotic resistance.

Many drugmakers have been reluctant to spend the money needed to develop new antibiotics, preferring to use their resources on medicines for cancer and rare diseases that command very high prices and lead to much larger profits.

In January, dozens of drugmakers and diagnostic companies, including Pfizer, Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline, signed a declaration calling for new incentives from governments to support investment in development of medicines to fight drug-resistant superbugs.

 

Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Additional reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Bernard Orr

Photo: Colonies of E. coli bacteria grown on a Hektoen enteric (HE) agar plate are seen in a microscopic image courtesy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  CDC/Handout via REUTERS  

This Week In Health: Tipping Point With ‘Superbugs’

This Week In Health: Tipping Point With ‘Superbugs’

“This Week In Health” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • Experts say we are at a tipping point with antibiotic-resistant bacteria — so-called “superbugs.” Due to the massive overuse of antibiotic drugs, pathogens are becoming increasingly immune to available treatments, posing a huge potential public health risk. The Food and Drug Administration is taking steps to curb the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock in an effort to mitigate the spread of these unkillable microbes.
  • A link between obesity and Type 2 diabetes has already been quite well established for some time. A new study published in mBio sheds new light on the precise mechanism: Type 2 diabetes is possibly caused by bacteria that become more prevalent in the bodies of people who gain weight. What this means in practice is that doctors may have a way to intercede and affect the course of Type 2 diabetes, by targeting the bacteria.
  • New research suggests that poor sleep in old age may be linked to the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. The findings imply that insufficient deep sleep contributes to “a reduced ability to cement memories in the brain over the long term, resulting in greater memory loss,” according to researchers.
  • The tragic loss of 46-year-old Beau Biden to brain cancer has brought renewed attention to brain tumors, an often lethal and not fully understood form of cancer, and to developing new and more effective treatments in the fight to cure them.

Photo: NIAID via Flickr

Promising New Antibiotic May Help Combat ‘Superbugs’

Promising New Antibiotic May Help Combat ‘Superbugs’

The rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens — so-called “superbugs” — has outpaced development of new drugs to treat them, posing a severe public health crisis. But a recently discovered antibiotic named Teixobactin may signal a promising new era in drug development, according to findings published in the journal Nature last week.

In the 1940s, the first generation of mass-produced antibiotics, such as penicillin, had a profound impact on medicine and public health in the developed world, greatly reducing illness and death from a wide swath of infectious diseases. The organisms that antibiotics were designed to kill evolved over time, however, leading to increasingly drug-resistant strains of bacteria that became more lethal and more difficult to treat. According to the CDC, these antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect at least 2 million people in the United States annually, 23,000 of whom die as a result. In a report released last spring, the World Health Organization warned that a “post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — is a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

Compounding the severity of the crisis, the creation of new antibiotics has all but stopped. Antibiotics are developed by cultivating naturally occurring chemicals that microorganisms produce in order to attack each other in an unending battle for natural resources. Scientists estimate that of all the antibiotic compounds that exist in nature, 99 percent of them cannot be cultivated in a laboratory setting. Most of the remaining 1 percent were mined by the 1960s, and novel antibiotics have been in shorty supply ever since, creating a stalled pipeline for research and development of new drugs.

In 2002, researchers at Northeastern University began working on a new method of cultivating these finicky microorganisms. The iChip, which represents the culmination of over a decade of labor, is a two-inch-long device that scientists stick in microbe-rich mud, yielding tremendous results. The chip isolates the microbes that exist in samples of diluted dirt into distinct holes, and then sandwiches those samples between permeable membranes that allow bacteria to flourish in their natural habitat — the muck. According to the Nature report, the “growth recovery by this method approaches 50 percent,” making it 50 times more efficient than soil cultures grown in petri dishes. It was through this method that scientists discovered Teixobactin.

As of now, Teixobactin has only been tested in mice, but the results have been encouraging. It has been shown to stop common bacterial infections, as well as drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and staph, with no apparent side effects. While most antibiotics work by attacking proteins, Teixobactin takes a different, more effective tack: it shuts down the processes by which bacteria erect their cell walls. This kills microbes quickly, and the DNA that codes the building of cell walls is less likely to mutate than the genes that direct protein creation. All this greatly fortifies Teixobactin against the possibility of bacteria developing a resistance against it.

Human trials of the drug are unlikely to begin for at least two years. Still, the success of the new iChip technology and the early success shown demonstrated by its discoveries point to a brighter future in the battle against superbugs. For new antibiotics, it will be a long road from the dirt to the drug store, but this is a monumental first step.

Photo: NIAID via flickr

Breeding Antibiotic Resistance Through Our Food

Breeding Antibiotic Resistance Through Our Food

According to a new report released by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) the meat industry is using more medical-grade antibiotics than ever in its livestock feed and water. And it’s not due to increased production since beef, chicken, and pork production did not rise during the period under review (2009-2012).

What this means for consumers and the healthcare industry is that because we’re consuming medical antibiotics with our food, the antibiotics we need when we get sick will become resistant and lose their efficacy in treating disease. Just 6% of the drugs used by the meat industry are actually used to treat disease in their livestock.

For decades the FDA has been dragging on addressing the subject of antibiotic use in our meat supply. Even with the dire picture indicated by this report, their actions show they are still in thrall to the very industry they are supposed to regulate – the guidelines issued to the meat industry are, wait for it, purely voluntary.

According to Mother Jones “sales of cephalosporins, a drug used to treat respiratory-tract infections, skin infections, and urinary-tract infections in people, rose about 4 percent between 2011 and 2012, even though the FDA had moved to scale back their use on January 4, 2012. That doesn’t exactly boost confidence.”

“The heavy use of antibiotics that are really not used in human medicine can cause harm through cross-resistance—that is, bacteria strains that develop resistance to one antibiotic can quickly become resistant to others.”

“Cross-resistance is a well-established phenomenon. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve to survive contact with a chemical intended to kill them. Factory farms are now incubating resistant bacteria strains that threaten people.”

Photo: Wikipedia