Drug-resistant bacteria strains becoming more virulent
I have written about drug-resistant bacteria in the past, and not a day goes by that there isn’t some press release on Eurekalert about antibiotic resistant bacteria. Most of these press releases are negative, and today was no exception. Every time I read about drug-resistant strains in the news, it freaks me out a little bit, and makes me uneasy deep down. Perhaps because I am more familiar with the subject than most, and I know that there isn’t much being done about the problem in the medical community because it’s not a profitable problem to tackle for the big pharmaceutical companies. Traditional antibiotics like macrolides, penicillin derivatives, fluoroquinolones, and others have been “enough” for most people… until recently.
My unease comes from several different factors. One of them is that here in the United States, it takes roughly ten years for a new chemical entity (NCE) to go from concept to approval to market. This ensures (in theory) that a drug is relatively safe and effective. With fast-tracking, this time can be roughly halved. That means if a drug company were to come across a new compound that killed several strains of drug-resistant bacteria, it would take almost ten years before prescribers would have it available to them. At the very least, it would take five years. In the meantime, untold numbers of people could die from related infections.
Drug-resistant strains like MRSA are responsible for such lovely conditions as necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating bacteria, as it is popularly known. Most people that end up with NF are otherwise-healthy individuals who somehow contracted it. This can happen as a result of soft tissue trauma (car accident, a cut or scrape, etc.) and it can be idiopathic, which means that its cause is unknown. The only cure for NF is to remove all of the compromised tissue. This can lead to amputated limbs or removing sections of the body. It’s not pleasant, and is just one of the common manifestations of drug resistant bacteria, and it happens to normal people: people like you and I just going about their daily lives. Of course there are risk factors that can increase your chances of infection, like diabetes mellitus and HIV, but they are hardly a requirement for infection.
In any case, a particularly disturbing press release today warns of drug-resistant bacteria gaining virulence. This means that aside from being able to resistant the antibiotics that we have today, they are also becoming more aggressive, spreading and killing faster than before. Once again, these are normal children that were infected.
[...]researchers at the University of Chicago describe three cases of rapidly progressive and ultimately fatal Staphylococcus aureus infections in small children.
Although all three children were previously healthy, the infection caused severe sepsis, rapid clinical deterioration and bleeding into the adrenal glands, a complication, known as Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome, that is usually associated with fulminant bacterial meningitis.
Two of the three bacterial strains were resistant to standard antibiotics. In all three cases, the disease progressed so rapidly that neither standard nor alternative antibiotics had an effect.
“What we saw in these patients is not in the textbooks,” said Robert Daum, M.D., professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study. “This is the first time this unusual syndrome has been described in patients with a Staph infection.”
This latest news only adds to the problem of drug-resistant strains. Right now, there is no way of beating this particular strain because it moves too fast. And indeed, with current knowledge, the only solution seems to lie in creating a vaccine that can prevent humans from becoming infected, since it “is the only way we have ever truly beaten an infectious disease.”
It is never my intention to fear-monger, because I believe that crying “wolf!” is a bad idea unless there is really, truly a problem. And the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria is a very real one, and it is something that the public needs to be more aware of. Many of the topics and things that I write about here on polyscience are largely fluff stories in that they’re simply interesting or cool, and don’t have much of an impact on people. But I believe this is not one of those fluff pieces.
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