New Wave of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

reporter writes "New strains of 'Gram-negative' bacteria have become resistant to all safe antibiotics. Though methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the best-known antibiotic-resistant germ, the new class of resistant bacteria could be more dangerous still. 'The bacteria, classified as Gram-negative because of their reaction to the so-called Gram stain test, can cause severe pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream, and other parts of the body. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive organisms like MRSA.' The only antibiotics — colistin and polymyxin B — that still have efficacy against Gram-negative bacteria produce dangerous side effects: kidney damage and nerve damage. Patients who are infected with Gram-negative bacteria must make the unsavory choice between life with kidney damage or death with intact kidneys. Recently, some new strains of Gram-negative bacteria have shown resistance against even colistin and polymyxin B. Infection with these new strains typically means death for the patient."

Comments

Idea

[shentino]

Stop wasting all those antibiotics on beefing up our cattle and giving a bunch of supergerms a tolerance for the stuff?

Re:Idea

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

No, it's obvious that we need even less government regulation so that the free market can allow doctors and sick patients to reach stable equilibrium with the bacterial hordes! There's a basic game theory model that proves my position!!!

Re:Idea

[SomeKDEUser]

It actually works: the resistance is basically the production of some proteins. These cost energy to produce.

Bacteria without the protection will out-compete those with the protection, in the absence of antibiotics: the latter require less energy to live and reproduce.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm horrified that you achieved +4 insightful instead of the +5 funny that you were going for.

Re:Idea

[rjh]

Are you a sociopath? Or do you just go about your life assuming that other people are sociopaths, even when you haven't met them and don't know anything about them?

The current best-of-breed treatment for cystic fibrosis involves having the afflicted person breathe a saline mist for a few hours a day. This has been peer-reviewed and has been found widely effective. It's even been reported in the science section of CNN, among other places.

It's true that Big Pharma isn't pushing this -- but it's notable that (a) this treatment is much more effective and much cheaper than what came before it, and (b) nobody tried to prevent it from getting published. (Quite the opposite, in fact: this thing got published far and wide and fast.)

Want to know why? Because there are people in Big Pharma who have kids with cystic fibrosis. Just like there are people in Big Pharma who have family members with cancer or HIV/AIDS, or emphysema.

Big Pharma wants you to live. Big Pharma wants you to live both for human reasons (the human beings in the company have human compassion for suffering and sickness) and financial reasons (once you're dead, you no longer get sick, which means you no longer need their services). If a doctor talks to a Big Pharma rep and says, "hey, I've got a six year old kid whose lungs are shot from cystic fibrosis, what can you do to help?", the Big Pharma rep will probably talk all about their expensive treatments and how good they are ... and then, off the record, will tell the doctor about the New England Journal of Medicine article that covers saline treatments for CF. Because being a Big Pharma rep is a job... but that rep might also be a father or a mother, and I can't imagine a parent who would stand by and let a little kid live in misery when a cheap and effective treatment exists.

This meme of "Big Pharma wants to kill you so that they can boost their stock price" is insulting. It has taken root only because popular culture has demonized Big Pharma so badly that a disturbing number of people will believe anything unflattering said about them, even if what they're being accused of doing runs counter to their own short- and long-term interests, to say nothing of their humanity.

Re:Idea

[mspohr]

I think you are missing the point. The problem is not a lack of new fancy antibiotics. The problem is the overuse and misuse of the antibiotics that we already have.

Antibiotic resistance develops when you have widespread use of antibiotics. Currently antibiotics are used widely by corporate farms (chickens are commonly fed antibiotics, etc.). This creates resistant bacteria. Basic evolution. (You can also reverse this by stopping the use of antibiotics and the bacteria will usually lose their resistance.) Antibiotics are also overprescribed for viral respiratory infections where they have no effect.

Fix these problems and we won't need your expensive designer antibiotics (which will become useless in a few years anyway).

Thanks

[complacence]

Great. A big thank-you to all the knee-jerk antibiotics prescribers and disinfectant abusers.

Re:Thanks

[samurphy21]

Sanitizers that lyse microbes with high doses of ethanol don't contribute to these antibiotic resistant critters, but over prescribing antibiotics definitely does.

However, a major player is also the improper use of properly prescribed antibiotics. People who stop taking their medicine for strep as soon as they feel better instead of completing the course, as is required.

This isn't entirely upon the doctors, but also upon those of us who don't follow doctors' directions.

Party like it's 1899

[mdf356]

Welcome back to the world before antibiotics were discovered.

However, a few decades of not using antibiotics at all and the bacteria around the world will again mostly be susceptible to the more common, low-risk ones. The mutations that make for antibiotic resistance have negative effects on bacteria's ability to reproduce... except in an environment with significant antibiotic use.

Re:Party like it's 1899

[F�an�ro]

However, a few decades of not using antibiotics at all and the bacteria around the world will again mostly be susceptible to the more common, low-risk ones. The mutations that make for antibiotic resistance have negative effects on bacteria's ability to reproduce... except in an environment with significant antibiotic use.

Immunity to antibiotics would diminish, but I imagine in many cases the neccessary genes would be only supressed or disabled, not completely removed. Plasmids integrated in an inactive part of the genome, point mutations in the promoters and stuff like that.
If we started using antibiotics again, immunities might quickly return.

Re:Ever been on a farm?

[rjh]

So, what you're saying is that if you drive to the farm yourself, cut out all the middlemen who are involved in distributing food to grocery stores and coops, etc., then you can buy beef that's reasonably priced (but still above market rates). And if for some reason you can't, then you have to buy from a co-op and pay substantially above-market rates.

You apparently live close enough to a small farm that you can cut out the middleman like this. Most Americans don't. Most Americans live in metropolitan areas and are dozens of miles away from the nearest small family farm. To someone living in a metro area like D.C., going out to a family farm is easily a two- or three-hour round trip. The opportunity costs there jack the $4.75 price up substantially more. You aren't just paying $4.75 per pound at that rate -- you're giving up a substantial chunk of your weekend, too.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because something works for you, that it will scale up to work for a nation of millions.

Re:Ever been on a farm?

[pushf popf]

But the elderly, who live on fixed incomes... poor families who depend on food stamps... or just a college student burdened with debt who wants to be able to take his girlfriend to a steakhouse for a special occasion... all of these people are seriously impacted.

Americans who can't afford beef can do the same thing the rest of the world does (at least those parts of the world that aren't starving). Eat something else.

Chicken is cheaper than beef, eggs are cheaper than chicken, and rice and beans is cheaper still. The cost of one dinner at a steakhouse for two will buy a huge sack of rice and huge sack of beans, including a bunch of stuff to make it taste good. This will easily last a month, even for a family.

Re:Ever been on a farm?

[lawpoop]

If we want to put a hundred pounds on each steer, then that means each steer needs half a ton of feed.

But the elderly, who live on fixed incomes... poor families who depend on food stamps... or just a college student burdened with debt who wants to be able to take his girlfriend to a steakhouse for a special occasion... all of these people are seriously impacted.

This is why you just eat some vegetarian food. I love a good steak as much as the next guy, but at this point, it seems that the economic/ecological arguments win out. What a waste of societies' resources to turn 1.5 tons of food into 100 pounds of food.

Re:Ever been on a farm?

[codegen]

I was raised in rural Saskatchewan and worked on a farm many times. While what you say about field yields is true, overuse of antibiotics in farming harms all of us. Those people you identify: elderly, poor families or college students now have to face even higher medical bills when they catch antibiotic resistant bacteria. There was a story a couple of years ago about the FDA clearing some of the last chance antibiotics for agricultural use. This story may or may not be related, but the quantities used when treating farm animals and the discharge of the antibiotics into the environment only put the rest of us at risk.

Re:What about a natural bacterial predator?

[morty_vikka]

Nice idea, but phage are also very good at facilitating horizontal gene transfer, so there's a chance they could make the problem worse by conferring resistance to other strains of related bacteria.