The “Indian Superbug”: Worse Than We Knew

[charlie]

Hoo-boy. If you haven't heard about this, it's not actually a bug, but a gene that confers multi-drug resistance to bacteria.

...Researchers though remain deeply concerned about NDM-1, along with a wider array of dire resistance factors of which it has suddenly become the best-known. This week, I’m at ICAAC (the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy), an enormous 12,000-person meeting focused on infectious diseases and the drugs to treat them, and talk of NDM-1 is everywhere.

The news is not good. This new resistance factor has been found so far in the United States, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Germany, Oman, Kenya, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. Most of the isolates, the bacterial samples in which it has been identified, are susceptible to only one or two remaining antibiotics. One was susceptible to none.

...

In the few papers on NDM-1 that got rustled up in time for ICAAC, there are more details on NDM-1’s behavior in patients in Australia, Canada, Kenya and the US; the patients were infected with different organisms, but the organisms all possessed the same gene, and were all susceptible at best to one or two drugs, some new, some old and with toxic side-effects. What connects that handful of reports: much more detail on the mobile genetic elements where the NDM gene resides. It is on more than one plasmid; it can move freely between plasmids; the plasmids have been shown to move not just between individual bacteria, but also between species and genera. Overall, that adds up to a resistance mechanism that is spreading with remarkable speed — and bringing with it, as fellow-travelers on the same plasmids, even more resistance mechanisms that have not yet been delineated.

...

There’s a clear concern that everyday physicians may see cases of this and not know what they are seeing. These infections look like any other — or will, until the point when patients don’t get better. At that point, what appeared to be a simple urinary tract infection, for instance, can climb backward to the kidneys, enter the bloodstream, and turn deadly. “General practitioners are not used to seeing multi-drug resistant bacteria in the community,” Dr. Pitout said. “If this does become common, it will lead to a lot of failure of treatment.”...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/the-indian-superbug-worse-than-we-knew

[wookie72]

1. I realize this is bad..

But as someone who has been saved countless times by antibiotics (at least one ear infection a year until my mid 20s), I think antibiotics are on the whole a good thing. We just need to find a different treatment, I guess. But the amount of people who are alive today because of antibiotics is incalculable.

[The Doctor.]

3. It took nearly 20 years to produce and disseminate effective treatments for AIDS

And the only vector for that was blood.

This is a whole new critter. We need to find some way to shut off the gene.

[xchrom]

2. recommend