As far as the potential for anti-resistant bacteria to spread, Laura Piddock, a professor of microbiology in the United Kingdom, told Reuters that she believes the use of antibiotics in livestock farming like, polymyxins, which reportedly include colistin (the “last resort” antibiotic), should be restricted. Frieden confirmed that the antibiotic only used in last-resort cases – colistin – had proved ineffective, despite being held only for use with “nightmare bacteria”. “Colistin is one of the last efficacious antibiotics for the treatment of highly resistant bacteria”.
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“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world”, said Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman.
He says, those in the medical field have been expecting and fearing this “super-bug” bacteria for some time and it’s proof, new antibiotics need to be developed.
Health officials are reporting the first USA case of a human infected with a “superbug” – a drug-resistant infection that leaves it victims with few, if any, options for treatment. What makes this “superbug” scarier is its potential to spread colistin resistance to other types of bacteria that are already highly resistant to multiple drugs, infectious disease experts said. The woman had not travelled in the five months before her infection. No other details about the case are available, including how she was infected.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said in a statement: “We are taking the emergence of this resistance gene very seriously, and we will take necessary actions to prevent mcr-1 from becoming a widespread problem with potentially serious consequences”.
The E. coli cultured from the woman’s urine, MRSN 388634, was forwarded to the lab at Walter Reed, where researchers began testing for resistance to colistin in response to the discovery of mcr-1, which they called a “truly pan-drug resistant bacteria”. The infection was reported on Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It was the first time scientists and public health officials identified a strain of bacteria in E. coli resistant to colistin, a long-considered “last resort” drug for patients with multi-drug resistant infections, HHS reported.
“The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients”.
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The 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania has recovered but U.S. health officials warned of the risk of it being “the end of the road” for antibiotics.
