methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
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Documentary Explores Use Of Antibiotics In Food Animals
On Tuesday night, PBS aired FRONTLINE’s two-part documentary exploring the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance. The first half of “The Trouble with Antibiotics” focused on the science and politics behind the widespread use of antibiotics in food animals, presenting the history of the practice and attempts to link human illnesses back to animal antibiotics...
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Drug-resistant Superbugs Could Become Deadlier than Cancer
Superbugs are on track to kill 10 million people a year by 2050--more than those who die from cancer, warned UK Chancellor George Osborne, who urged for global and radical action to fight the threat from bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. These drug-resistant bugs are "an even greater threat to mankind than cancer," said Osborne, who was in the District of Columbia late last week during a meeting of the International Monetary Fund, The Guardian reported...
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Farmworker Study Ties Drug-Resistant Staph To Animal Antibiotics
Authors of a paper published online by the open-access journal PLOS ONE reported livestock-associated MRSA and multidrug-resistant staph linked to livestock were present only among workers exposed to industrial livestock operations. Read More »
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Health System Turns To RFID To Slash Infection Rates
Infection control via improved hand-washing efforts is the impetus for a recently announced pilot project involving big data and wireless sensors at Columbus, Ohio-based OhioHealth. Read More »
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Hospitals' Struggles To Beat Back Familiar Infections Before Ebola Arrived
While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals – including some top medical centers – are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show...
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How Superbugs Hitch A Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community
Factory-scale farms don't just house hundreds of genetically similar animals in tight quarters over vast cesspools collecting their waste...And when you dose the animals daily with small amounts of antibiotics—a common practice—the bacteria strains in these vast germ reservoirs quite naturally develop the ability to withstand anti-bacterial treatments...
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How Superbugs Threaten Your Food And Life
...This worrying problem causing as much global concern as terrorism is antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics, the wonder drugs that made surgery safe and stopped disease outbreaks by preventing and curing all infections four decades ago, can no longer do so...
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Livestock Workers May Carry Staph Bacteria From Pigs
Workers who handle livestock may carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their noses after they leave the farm. A small study of hog workers in North Carolina found that many carried staph bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) and some carried drug-resistant strains of the bug, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA...
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New Arms Race: Science Versus Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs
The death rate from bacterial infections plummeted following the discovery of penicillin. However, these microbes developed ways to resist our antibiotics. What threats do superbugs pose and what factors contribute to their emergence? The discovery and development of antibiotics saved millions of lives during the latter half of the 20th century. Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, who witnessed soldiers with infected wounds perish while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, per chance discovered a penicillin producing mold in 1928...
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Nurses' Scrubs Often Contaminated with Bad Bugs
Bad bugs readily spread from patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) to nurses' scrubs and the room, according to research being presented at IDWeek 2016™. The sleeves and pockets of the scrubs and the bed railing were the most likely to be contaminated. The study tracked the transmission of bacteria known to be particularly troublesome in hospitals, including those such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which are resistant to many antibiotics...
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Overdue Outbreak Detection System Leaves Patchwork Defense
The U.S. should have had a nationwide network to monitor for the next viral outbreak or biological threat a decade ago. It still doesn't. Instead, public health leaders make do with a patchwork system while waiting for the Department of Health and Human Services races to get its integrated network in service by a new 2023 congressional deadline. Until that nationwide monitoring system is in place, the U.S. runs the risk that a biological threat like a disease outbreak will take hold before it's noticed. "The risk is that we don't have the level of surveillance that we need. The risk is that there are things basically flying under the radar," said Helen Boucher, an infectious diseases clinician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and director of the university's Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance.
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Promising Antibiotic Discovered In Microbial "Dark Matter"
Potential drug kills pathogens such as MRSA—and was discovered by mining "unculturable" bacteria...
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Revolutionary New Antibiotic Alternative Could Save The World From Superbug 'Apocalypse'
Scientists have developed a new alternative to antibiotics that could revolutionise the way we treat superbugs and avoid a scenario where common medical procedures become life-threatening due to bacteria becoming immune to conventional drugs...
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Science, Society And Risk In The Anthropocene
The culture of too much hygiene in rapid, unplanned urbanising society with poor infrastructure exposes urban spaces to a particular risk brought about by unchecked use of technology. This article looks at the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and antibacterial consumer products, which form the aetiology for the emergence of new strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria (superbugs) in urban space, especially in waterbodies...
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Serious Resistant Infections Increasingly Found In Children
Here’s some disturbing news published late last week in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society by a team of researchers from two Chicago medical institutions plus an expert analyst of antibiotic resistance: Serious drug-resistant infections in children are rising across the United States. [...] Read More »
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