The superbug that doctors have been dreading just reached the U.S.

For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics.

The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”

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Source: washingtonpost

Antibiotic resistance solution proposed

A group of US scientists are confident the key to tackling antibiotic resistant bacteria is already in front of our faces – non-antibiotic therapeutic drugs.

At least 50,000 people die every year in Europe and the US due to antibiotic resistance. In other areas of the world this figure is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Professor Ashok Chopra, from the University of Texas, said: “There are no new antibiotics which are being developed and nobody really has given much emphasis to this because everyone feels we have enough antibiotics in the market.

“But now the problem is bugs are becoming resistant to multiple antibiotics. That’s why we started thinking about looking at other molecules that could have some effect in killing antibiotic resistant bacteria.”

Read more: Antibiotic resistance solution proposed

Source: labnews

Antibiotics not promote resistance through gene conjugation.

The exponential rise of antibiotic drug resistance is a considerable threat to global public health. Researchers are continually searching for the underlying mechanisms that promote this resistant phenotype. Some evidence exists to suggest that antibiotic use encourages the spread of bacterial resistance through genetic swapping. However, new research suggests that these examples are outliers and not indicative of the majority of bacterial populations.

Researchers at Duke University suggest that differential birth and death rates of microbes and not DNA donation are to blame. The results have implications for designing antibiotic protocols to avoid the spread of antibacterial resistance. 

"The entire field knows there's a huge problem of overusing antibiotics," noted senior study author Lingchong You, Ph.D., associate professor of engineering at Duke University. "It is incredibly tempting to assume that antibiotics are promoting the spread of resistance by increasing the rate at which bacteria share resistant genes with each other, but our research shows they often aren't."

Investigators have known for decades that bacteria can swap genetic elements through a process called conjugation, which allows helpful genes to spread quickly between individuals and even between species. Because the number of resistant bacteria rises when antibiotics fail to kill them, many researchers have assumed that the drugs increased the amount of genetic swapping taking place. The Duke researchers, however, hypothesized that the antibiotics were killing off the two "parent" lineages and allowing a newly resistant strain to thrive instead.

Read more: Antibiotics not promote resistance through gene conjugation.

Source: biologyexams4u