Suberbugs are huge at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), meeting in Boston this week.
Cosmos Mag said lack of new antibiotics at a time of rising antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’ will be the main focus" of the meeting. “We are increasingly concerned about the decline in antibiotic discovery,” said Lindsay Grayson of Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, who is program chair.
The conference web site links to daily reports on the gathering including today’s
NDM-1 presentation.
AP reported that:
A new gene that can turn many types of bacteria into superbugs resistant to nearly all antibiotics has sickened people in three states and is popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday.
The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.
How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.Scientists have long feared this — a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance.
This is not super new news, even though the meeting is generating some attention.
From the NY Times in August:
Experts in antibiotic resistance called the gene mutation, named NDM-1, “worrying” and “ominous,” and they said they feared it would spread globally.
But they also put it in perspective: there are numerous strains of antibiotic-resistant germs, and although they have killed many patients in hospitals and nursing homes, none have yet lived up to the “superbug” and “flesh-eating bacteria” hyperbole that greets the discovery of each new one.
“They’re all bad,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Is NDM-1 more worrisome than MRSA? It’s too early to judge.”