Superbug reaches the U.S.
For the first time, researchers have found a person in the U.S. carrying a bacteria resistant to Colistin, the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as CRE, which health officials have dubbed "nightmare bacteria."
In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country's most urgent public health threats.
The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Department of Defense researchers determined that carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin.
CDC officials are working with Pennsylvania health authorities to interview the patient and family to identify how she may have contracted the bacteria, including reviewing recent hospitalizations and other healthcare exposures. CDC hopes to screen the patient and other contacts to see if others might be carrying the organism. Local and state health departments will also be collecting cultures as part of the investigation.
Bacteria develop antibiotic resistance in two ways. Many acquire mutations in their own genomes that allow them to withstand antibiotics, although that ability can't be shared with pathogens outside their own family.
Other bacteria rely on a shortcut: they get infected with something called a plasmid, a small piece of DNA, carrying a gene for antibiotic resistance. That makes resistance genes more dangerous because plasmids can make copies of themselves and transfer the genes they carry to other bugs within the same family as well as jump to other families of bacteria, which can then "catch" the resistance directly without having to develop it through evolution.
The colistin-resistant E. coli found in the Pennsylvania woman has this type of resistance gene.
How to stop superbugs from killing 10 million people a year
Superbugs could kill one person every three seconds by 2050, the equivalent of 10 million people a year, according to the final report last week from the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, established in 2014 to keep the world from being "cast back into the dark ages of medicine."
The authors highlight the increasing burden of resistance and call for greater awareness of the problem, including the need for public campaigns beginning as soon as this summer.
Superbugs are bacteria that are resistant to the antimicrobial drugs typically used to kill them. They are estimated to cause 700,000 deaths every year. If no action is taken, these numbers are expected to rise dramatically, causing more deaths than cancer by 2050. This would mean common procedures such as giving birth, treating wounds and undergoing surgery could become fatal due to a lack of effective antibiotics.
Several causes underlying the emergence of resistance have been highlighted in the report, along with 10 areas in which to take action, including a massive global awareness campaign to reduce demand for, and prescription of, antibiotics, better global surveillance of resistance, funds for more research into new antimicrobials, and building a global coalition through the G20 and United Nations.
The projected numbers are enough to enlist panic among people fearing a future where now-treatable conditions cannot be cured, but attention should be focused on pushing for solutions, according to experts.
The drug industry has not invested much time or money in the development of antimicrobials because of the low returns they would get as their products sit in pharmacies for use mainly in emergencies when standard drugs aren't effective.
