A 25-year-old Malaysian PhD student at the University of Melbourne thinks she has figured out how to kill bacteria that have stopped responding to antibiotics.
Shu Lam’s breakthrough couldn’t have come soon enough. The MCR-1 gene, which makes bacteria resistant to all antibiotics, is marching across the globe. It has been found in 4 people in the United States this year, including a toddler.
Hawaii is now home to a string of drug-resistant gonorrhea cases, which further signal a coming-age in which sexually transmitted diseases (as well as others) are no longer treatable with current medicine.
Seven patients with this strain were finally treated with the 2-drug combination of ceftriaxone and azithromycin, with lab resulting confirming that the bug was very resistant to azithromycin and was gaining resistance against ceftriaxone. This is yet another example of how last-resort drugs were shown to be ineffective in the fight against gonorrhea.
On September 21, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed a declaration aimed at slowing the spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, calling it “historical” and “a turning point.”
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Dr. Keiji Fukada said:
“I think the declaration will have very strong implications. What it will convey is that there’s recognition that we have a big problem and there’s a commitment to do something about it.”
Starbucks didn't fare very well either.
Superbugs becoming resistant to antibiotics have been all over the news in recent months. Though while we’ve been hearing about this often, wouldn’t be it cool to actually see it? Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have made a short film that actually depicts bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, allowing us to see evolution first-hand.
A 4th case of a superbug that is resistant to antibiotics of last resort has been reported in a Connecticut toddler, and health officials are scrambling to figure out where else the superbugs might be lurking.
A study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom has found that one in four chicken samples, taken from the most common UK supermarkets, contain antibiotic resistant E. coli. [1]
This study, which was commissioned by the group Save Our Antibiotics, concluded that 51% of E. coli found in both pork and poultry samples were resistant to the common antibiotic trimethoprim, which is often used to treat lower urinary tract infections.
Mark Holmes, who conducted the research, stated that the findings were “worrying.” [2]
In a new study, researchers found that repeated treatments with antibiotics increased the risk of Type 1 diabetes in the rodents. [1]
The finding is harrowing, considering that approximately half of all prescriptions written for antibiotics in the United States are inappropriate and that a recent study found that antibiotics are prescribed to children about twice as often as they should be. [2]
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued new guidelines for treating gonorrhea that reflect the looming threat posed by antibiotic resistance.
Under the U.N. health agency’s new directives, gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD), should no longer be treated with a class of antibiotics called quinolones, because quinolone-resistant strains of the disease have emerged all over the world. [1]
Many people in the United States hang on to leftover antibiotics and say that if they got sick, they’d use them without going to the doctor, a new study finds.
The findings are so problematic, it’s hard to even know where to begin. However, one of the main concerns is that this practice leads people to take the drugs when they might not need them, which may further the spread of resistance to antibiotics.
