Superbug Scenario: Antibiotic Resistance will be ‘Catastrophe’ on par with Terrorism

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs will push medical science back to the 19th century, with people dying of minor infections says Britain’s top health official.

Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, said action is urgently needed to fight antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance and that new drugs must be developed to treat new mutating infections.

She warned that if nothing is done to reverse the situation Britain would face an apocalyptic scenario with “a health system not dissimilar from the 19th century.”

READ MORE: http://rt.com/news/health-medicine-superbugs-antibiotics-099/

‘Virtually Untreatable’ tuberculosis threat rising, study finds

Posted by The Extinction Protocol: 2012 and beyond

August 30, 2012 – HEALTH - Almost half of tuberculosis patients who received prior treatment were resistant to a second-line drug, suggesting the deadly disease may become “virtually untreatable,” according to a new study. Among 1,278 patients who were resistant to two or more first-line tuberculosis drugs in Estonia, Latvia, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, 43.7 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, according to a study led by Tracy Dalton at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings were published in the Lancet medical journal today. About 1.4 million people died from TB, the second-deadliest infectious disease globally after AIDS, and 650,000 cases were multi-drug resistant in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. Rising infection rates prompted the U.K. to announce in May it will require pre-entry tuberculosis screening for migrants from 67 countries seeking to enter the country for more than 6 months. “The global emergence of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis heralds the advent of widespread, virtually untreatable tuberculosis,” the study authors said in the published paper. Previous treatment with second-line drugs was the strongest risk factor for resistance to these drugs, the authors said. The prevalence of drug resistance, which ranged from 33 percent in Thailand to 62 percent in Latvia, also correlates with how long second-line drugs have been available in each country. South Korea and Russia had the longest histories of availability — more than 20 years — and the highest rates of resistance. In contrast, Thailand, Philippines and Peru, where second-line drugs were introduced 10 years ago or less, had the lowest resistance rates. Unemployment, alcohol abuse and smoking were also associated with resistance to second-line injectable treatment across countries. This is one of the few studies that have followed patients with the multi-drug-resistant form of TB for several years, Justin Denholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, said in a phone interview. Patients not taking their medicines properly is a major driver for resistance, said Denholm, who is studying TB transmission patterns in Australia’s Victoria state. –SF Gate

IDF Quarantines Yoav Base Amid ‘Outbreak’

The IDF‘s top physician has ordered a base in the Golan sealed and cleansed, and its soldiers screened, amid a spreading bacterial infection

IsraelNationalNews

By Gabe Kahn

First Publish: 7/24/2012, 6:58 PM

IDF checkpoint

Israel news photo: Flash 90

IDF chief medical officer Gen. Itzik Kreis on Tuesday ordered the Yoav base in the Golan Heights quarantined after several soldiers fell ill with a bacterial infection.

Arutz Sheva has learned many soldiers at the base, including soldiers working in the kitchens, complained of itching all over their bodies.

As a result, the base has been sealed and a full sanitization effort is underway. All equipment, personal belongings, textile goods, and even personnel files are being removed in order to be cleansed.

Arutz Sheva further learned that all mattresses on the base were removed and will be replaced. Hazmat teams are spraying and disenfecting structures, vehicles, and grounds, as well.

Meanwhile, IDF medical personnel are screening soldiers and isolating those affected to ensure the infection does not spread.

The IDF spokesperson’s office has thus far declined to comment on the exact nature and full extent of the infection.

China faces serious epidemic of drug-resistant TB

Posted by The Extinction Protocol: 2012 and beyond

June 7, 2012 – BEIJING - China faces a “serious epidemic” of drug-resistant tuberculosis according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of the size of the problem there, said a U.S. published study on Wednesday. “In 2007, one third of the patients with new cases of tuberculosis and one half of the patients with previously treated tuberculosis had drug-resistant disease,” said the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even more, the prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB in new cases (5.7 percent) was nearly twice the global average, said the study. Using World Health Organization figures as a basis for comparison, “China has the highest annual number of cases of MDR tuberculosis in the world — a quarter of the cases worldwide,” it added. “China has a serious epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis.” The data came from a survey of more than 4,600 Chinese people who were recently diagnosed or treated for TB. Patients for the study were treated at local TB clinics, not hospitals, and the survey was conducted by the National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory (NTRL) of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control. According to an accompanying editorial by Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist Richard Chaisson, the growth of drug-resistant TB presents an “enormous challenge.” Even more concerning was the finding that most of the 110,000 drug-resistant cases were in people newly diagnosed with the disease, suggesting that the virulent bacteria are being transmitted from person to person and not developing solely as a result of a person prematurely stopping treatment. “MDR tuberculosis is linked to inadequate treatment in both the public health system and the hospital system, especially tuberculosis hospitals; however, primary transmission accounts for most cases,” said the study. In China, over one million new tuberculosis infections occur each year — a large chunk of the estimated nine million new cases worldwide annually. Known formally as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB spreads through the air when infected people cough up bacteria. TB kills about 1.5 million people worldwide each year. –Terra Daily

WHO warns of growing drug resistance in sexually transmitted gonorrhea that infect millions

  – GENEVA - A potentially dangerous sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness. “This organism has basically been developing resistance against every medication we’ve thrown at it,” said Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, a scientist in the agency’s department of sexually transmitted diseases. This includes a group of antibiotics called cephalosporins currently considered the last line of treatment. “In a couple of years it will have become resistant to every treatment option we have available now,” she told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of WHO’s public announcement on its global action plan’ to combat the disease. Lusti-Narasimhan said the new guidance is aimed at ending complacency about gonorrhea and encouraging researchers to speed up their hunt for a new cure. Once considered a scourge of sailors and soldiers, gonorrhea — known colloquially as the clap — became easily treatable with the discovery of penicillin. Now, it is again the second most common sexually transmitted infection after chlamydia. The global health body estimates that of the 498 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections worldwide, gonorrhea is responsible for some 106 million infections annually. It also increases the chances of infection with other diseases, such as HIV. “It’s not a European problem or an African problem, it’s really a worldwide problem,” said Lusti-Narasimhan. Scientists believe overuse or incorrect use of antibiotics, coupled with the gonorrhea bacteria’s astonishing ability to adapt, means the disease is now close to becoming a super bug. Bacteria that survive antibiotic treatment due to a mutation that makes them resistant then quickly spread their genes in an accelerated process of natural selection. This is a general problem affecting all antibiotics, but gonorrhea is particularly quick to adapt, said Lusti-Narasimhan. “If it didn’t do so much damage it would actually be a fun organism to study,” she said. Resistance to cephalosporins was first reported in Japan, but more recently has also been detected in Britain, Australia, France, Sweden and Norway. As these are all countries with well-developed health systems, it is likely that cephalosporin-resistant strains are also circulating undetected elsewhere. –Star Tribune