Colistin is considered a last-resort antibiotic for bacteria that does not respond to medication.
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The case was reported Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
A 49-year old woman was infected with CRE, or carbepemen-resistant enterobacteraceae. So, how this Pennsylvania woman contracted the bacteria, is still unknown.
“The Department of Defense released information about a woman with no travel outside of the US who is the first human documented case in the United States of having a urinary tract infection, or any infection, with an organism resistant to every antibiotic”, said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The colistin-resistant strain had been discovered in Europe, Africa, South America and Canada following reports of Chinese and British researchers finding the bacteria in pigs, raw pork meat and some people in China in November. What worries health officials is the gene that made the E. coli antibiotic-resistant.
The first ever detection of the “nightmare bacteria” in the United States has set the alarm bells ringing in the healthcare community. “We need to do a very comprehensive job protecting antibiotics so that we can have them and our children can have them”.
Here’s a quick look at the “superbug” and what mcr-1 is. The woman had not travelled in the five months before her infection.
The alarming development “basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics-that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive care units, or patients getting urinary tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics”, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post.
The CDC and the Pennsylvania State Health Department mobilized immediately to investigate the case and to trace the contacts the patient may have had to see if the bacteria had spread.
Infectious disease experts have warned for years that overuse of antibiotics is weakening the effectiveness of human defenses against harmful bacteria by creating bugs that are immune to drugs. But as they note, this testing program has only been up and running at Walter Reed for three weeks, so “it remains unclear what the true prevalence of mcr-1 is in the population…” “People get antibiotics for viruses where antibiotics don’t really help, but that still allows bacteria to develop these mechanisms of resistance and become stronger and stronger”.
Antibiotic resistance happens if the bacterium change and are able to fool the antibiotic by “hiding” or by pushing the drug out of the cell.
Few details have been released about the woman whose urine turned up positive for the E. coli.
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Allegheny Health Network’s Dr Thomas Walsh said: “We are going to see this more and more frequently if we continue to have rampant inappropriate use of antibiotics that promotes all this resistance”.
