Thread: Superpowered germs are a growing threat

Published Tuesday May 6, 2008
Superpowered germs are a growing threat
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1219&u_sid=10328026

The threat of death-defying bacteria, stubborn organisms that refuse to be conquered by antibiotic medicines, is growing more alarming.

Infectious microbes that used to be able to resist only one drug, such as penicillin or methicillin, now resist multiple drugs. Some can survive virtually every weapon in doctors' medicine cabinets.

"This is very worrisome," said Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University in Boston. "In many cases, there might be only one or no drugs to treat (an infection). We are not keeping up with the bacteria."

Two troubling developments:

• Some bacteria have acquired the ability to "eat" the very antibiotic medicines that are supposed to eat them.

"Almost all the drugs that we consider as our mainline defense against bacterial infections are at risk from bacteria that not only resist the drugs, but eat them for breakfast," George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, wrote in the April 4 issue of the journal Science.

• A lethal new form of tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, that's virtually impossible to cure has exploded in Africa, Asia and Russia. There are also a small number of cases in the United States.

These XDR-TB bacteria possess "such extensive drug resistance as to be nearly untreatable with currently available drugs," Sarita Shah, a epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, reported in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.

Church led a team of scientists who discovered "super-resistant" bacteria dining on a diet of antibiotics at 11 different soil sites. The researchers tested 18 well-known antibiotics, including vancomycin, which is often called doctors' "last line of defense" against drug-resistant germs.

None of the antibiotics kept the bacteria from multiplying, despite concentrations as much as 50 times higher than normal use.

"There is no easy solution," said Michael Kimmerling, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. "We need to understand what's going on."

Meanwhile, scientists have been tracking the spread of antibiotic-resistant TB bacteria since a surge in the 1990s.

Most of these TB germs are "multi-drug resistant," or MDR-TB, because they resist many medicines. The World Health Organization estimated that about 490,000 MDR-TB cases, including 116,000 deaths, occur each year.

In the last few years, however, an "extremely-drug resistant" strain, called XDR-TB for short, has exploded. XDR-TB infected about 27,000 people and caused about 16,000 deaths worldwide in 2006, WHO reported.

The United States is not immune to the problem, which is particularly prevalent among immigrants.

[b]This is pretty scary stuff...especially, the immigrant thing![/b]

We legal immigrants aren't scary!! We are tested for a host of things including TB & HIV/AIDS. Also we have to have been vaccinated against things like diptheria, polio etc.

For the life of me I cannot understand the logic of all this!! If they give amnesty to the IAs will they have to have medicals and be sent home if they present with any communicable disease?? Yeah, right

scottiemum....Sorry I didn't mean to lump legal in with illegal immigrants! My apologies.

I didn't know what requirements are for legal immigrants. Glad to know this info. I don't understand why they are so concerned about legal immigrants bringing infectious diseases into our country when they don't give a crap about whether an illegal is infectious until they get sick or infect someone else.

My wife and I had our three series of hepatitus shots done recently before an overseas trip. It was more for the U.S. as from time to time, even here in Nebraska, someone working food service with hepatitus infects customers.

Ya....legal immigrants have health screens...basic things for people who travel and might be exposed to a new strain that way...but the majority are illegal who never had any screening or even know they are carrying anything. They are comming into areas across the world to where people are exposed to things they may never have been exposed to otherwise.

Interesting sidebar.....Here in the Houston area, there was another round of TB testing at a local high school. It was the third time this year in that one school district alone.