While this is the first case her, e the same type of resistance to a last resort drug has been seen in humans and animals in China, Europe and Canada.
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Health officials have expressed grave concern the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads. They are actually echoing remarks made in November when a study by researchers in China and the United Kingdom described a gene found in bacteria that makes them resistant to “last ditch effort” antibiotics.
The infection was reported yesterday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
“It was an old antibiotic, but it was the only one left for what I called nightmare bacteria, carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, or CRE”, Frieden said according to CNBC.
CRE have developed resistance to nearly all available antibiotics, making CRE infections extremely hard to treat. If those germs pick up the colistin-resistance gene, doctors may be out of treatment options, health officials say.
Health professionals hope that this recent discovery in the US will help urge funding for research surrounding antibiotics to fight these superbugs as well as other alternative ways of combatting them. She is being treated for a urinary tract infection at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“It carries the plasmid [genetic material] for colistin resistance”, said Dr. Beth Bell, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and the person overseeing antibiotic resistance. “It is a feeling of such horror and helplessness”, said Frieden.
When superbugs, some of which can claim the lives of 50 per cent of their infectants, fail to react to the majority of antibiotics, health experts resort to a super-antibiotic called colistin but even this has been rendered useless.
In the United States, antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually. The problem is that the genes which make it resistant to our strongest anti-biotics will inevitably continue to spread.
“The more we look, the more we’ll find”, Frieden said.
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Since the first transferrable gene for colistin-resistance was identified in China in 2015, microbiologists have been monitoring food supply and humans for its presence, according to the study that reported the US finding, which was published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
