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The Most Dangerous Bacteria
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes has a story listing the six most dangerous bacteria (one's actually a fungus, but it kills people who get it half the time) that have afflicted athletes, soldiers, and hospital patients. Some scientists worry that even with a bunch of new antibiotics hitting the market, there still aren't enough and they want legislation to make it easier for companies to develop them."
As I am a ICU doctor, I see these guys more often that I want.
The problem is that the drug companies don't make much money from antibotics. They have high production costs and are used infrequently...
While hypertension and anti-cholesterol medicines are used by almost everyone if they live long enough.
At least that's the theory why drug companies spend so much less money creating antibotics than other meds.
Syphilis is neither that dangerous nor a bacteria.
The title of the article is very misleading. These 6 are the bacteria/fungus that have been become the highest resistant to antibotics.
Pneumococcus pneumonia, neisseria meningitis, and strep soft tissue infections typically kill patients much quicker than the organisms listed above.... we have good antibotics for these; however, they can just overwealm the system before the antibotics have time to work.
Recently, the British version of the American Medical Association (AMA) recommended that Doctors stop wearing ties and those spiffy white lab coats.
:major: image thing and that patients respond much more favorably to it than normal clothes.
They said that since guys rarely wash their ties, they end up carrying around bugs, ditto for labcoats. The article I read specifically mentioned MRSA*, which is one of the 6 "scary" bugs TFA mentions.
I told this to my doctor and they said that the white lab coats is a
*Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
AKA 'Staph'
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
He spells out how bacteria acquire their antibiotic resistance: The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world's free bacteria dwell. In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria. Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes. And they never sleep.
If you haven't read it already, click the link - it is well worth it. It still scares the hell out of me, and it looks like his dark vision is coming true...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Ooh, ooh, I know! Let's patent their DNA. That way, if any bacteria decides to multiply, we just drag them through court!
Out of spite for Forbes, here's the list (yeah yeah, you can click slower/faster/stop)...
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
Drug-resistant "staph" causes 102,000 hospital infections a year, more than any other. For sick patients, it can be a killer. Recently, S. aureus has escaped the hospital. The number of children infected jumped 28% in three years. Now, athletes are being infected. In 2003, five football players on the St. Louis Rams suffered staph-infected turf burns that resisted multiple antibiotics.
Escheria coli and Klebsiella
These bacteria, a major cause of urinary tract, gastrointestinal and wound infections, are quickly becoming resistant to existing drugs. Half of Klebsiella, for instance, were found to be resistant to Cipro in a recent study. More worrisome, two experimental drugs being tested against these bacteria are in the same class as drugs to which the bugs are already resistant.
Acinetobacter baumannii
This drug is perhaps most well known for its presence in troops returning from Iraq, where it has infected dozens of patients and spread to others inside hospitals. It is also an increasingly common cause of pneumonia, now accounting for 7% of hospital-acquired cases. There are few existing drugs to treat it, and no medicines in development targeted at this bug.
Aspergillis
Cancer patients, transplant patients and others with weak immune systems are at risk of being infected with this fungus. Once it gets loose in the bloodstream, aspergillis kills 50% of the time or more--and that's with the best new antifungal drugs that have been developed in recent years. Experts complain that drug companies are choosing to test their medicines on other, easier-to-treat fungal infections.
Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE)
VRE is a major cause of infection of the heart, brain and the abdomen. A recent survey of 494 U.S. hospitals found infections of 10% across all patient groups. Current drugs do not rapidly kill the bug, and only one is available as a pill.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
This bug is better than most other bacteria at becoming resistant to new antibiotics. A third of P. aeruginosa were found to be resistant to drugs like Cipro and Levaquin in 2002. Patients with cystic fibrosis are at particular risk; antibiotics can keep them healthy, but once bacteria become resistant, they may need lung transplants.
Bacterial resistance? It's an exercise in futility: doctors are very careful in prescripting antibiotics unnecessarily, but as far as I know, animal feed is laced with antibiotics (makes them grow faster, and you get less disease in crowded conditions). The antibiotics used are related to the ones used in humans. All this resistance came not from antibiotics we use on ourselves, since it is dwarfed by those use for feeding pigs and chickens... Who to blame though? This is a classic case of the "tragedy of the commons" - if one doesn't use antibiotics for his/her farm, one's competitor will.
when bacteria fail to understand that evolution is only a theory!
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"