Science 18 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 356 - 361
The last decade has seen the inexorable proliferation of a host of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or bad bugs, not just (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) MRSA but other insidious players as well, including Acinetobacter baumannii, Enterococcus faecium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species. The problem was predictable--"resistance happens," as Karen Bush, an anti-infectives researcher at Johnson and Johnson (J&J) in Raritan, New Jersey, puts it--but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with. In 2002, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that at least 90,000 deaths a year in the United States could be attributed to bacterial infections, more than half caused by bugs resistant to at least one commonly used antibiotic. Last October, CDC reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the number of serious infections caused by MRSA alone was close to 100,000 a year, with almost 19,000 related fatalities--a number, an accompanying editorial observed, that is larger than the U.S. death toll attributed to HIV/AIDS in the same year.Comment: Too bad the Bush administration did not declare a war on bacteria instead of a war on terror. It might have saved a lot more lives had it done so.
My point is that it is important to know the numbers in order to judge which risks are more important. Together with an understanding of the potential for risk reduction, that way can lead to better policies, or at least policies that more fully accomplish stated purposes such as preventing deaths. JAD
3 comments:
Its likely to be true, we are all not going downhill due to terror, war or global warming but due to bacteria slowly wiping us all of from this planet.
I have foreseen this happening when I managed a child dying with this bacterial infection and have been warning authorities since 1989. Now I think it’s too late and we cannot reverse the process. Truth is something people don’t want to believe but lies are easily accepted.
I am not worried about our generation but am very concerned about our children’s. It would be better if the earth tilted and all of us disappeared similar to ice age but death due to bacterial infections is likely to be a slow and painful. CDC published a statement "Children born after 2000 will probably die before their parents", a worrying prospect and a sad one.
Invasive procedures, operations, plastic surgery, transplant surgery, hip or knee replacement, open heart surgery, bypass and minor surgical procedures will come to a grinding halt. The very technology we’ve created to help us live more comfortable and often healthier lives will turn around and bite us-hard.
This may sounds like a Sci-Fi film, but the CA-MRSA scare is all too real - one of several health alerts this year that proved just how vulnerable we are despite all our scientific know-how and advances in medicine
The Royal Society of Medicine says that “We are heading towards a "pre-antibiotic era" with no effective treatment for some infections". The Society claims that not enough is being done to develop new antibiotics and other ways to tackle infection. Instead, too much policy is focused on controlling disease and reducing the number of antibiotics taken, a report released by the Society warns.
www.safecannula.com
Resistance does happen but it's had a lot of help along the way.
Negligence in the form of abuse of the use antibiotics has fast tracked the resistance.
Negligence on part of our medical centers in not following basic infectious disease protocal once they know they have a bad bug problem in additional to keeping filthy facilities have spread these bugs rapidly.
Acinetobacter baumannii strains have fast tracked to drug resistance and are already being acquired in the community.
Pets are now testing positive for it.
Until hospitals are forced to clean up their acts and to announce to the public that their hospitals are not safe from these bugs lives will continue to be lost needlessly.
www.acinetobacterbaumannii.org
What great comments. Informed and passionate about a problem too little appreciated by the public or even the medical profession.
I am under the impression that even if we were to reduce the problem of hospitals in this country, there would be the problems of hospitals in other countries. (I remember visiting a delivery suite in a South American country in which the floor was covered in dirt so thick one could not identify the flooring material).
Drug resistance is also being created, as I understand the situation, by massive uncontrolled use drug therapy against infectious diseases in humans in much of the world, and by massive use of antibiotics in apparently healthy livestock to increase profits.
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