superbugs
See the following -
How We Could Kill Superbugs Without Antibiotics
Antibiotics will soon be useless, but U.K. scientists have come up with a new way to kill bacteria—and it's not with a drug. And perhaps the best thing about this approach is that bacteria may not be able to build resistance against it. A team from the University of East Anglia, publishing in the journal Nature, figured out that the key to destroying bacteria is understanding how they build their defensive walls. It’s like ruining an astronaut’s space suit instead of going after the astronauts inside...
- Login to post comments
Is The US Meat Industry Pushing Us Into A ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’?
...Big Meat’s rampant use of antibiotics is one of the most worrying aspects of the meat industry, an issue that unites public health advocates, doctors, consumers, and others in shared concern...
- Login to post comments
Killing Superbugs with Star-Shaped Polymers, not Antibiotics
Tiny, star-shaped molecules are effective at killing bacteria that can no longer be killed by current antibiotics, new research shows. The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs). The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called ‘peptide polymers’, and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering...
- Login to post comments
Liposomes Could be a Possible Alternative To Antibiotics
Scientists from the University of Bern have developed a novel substance for the treatment of severe bacterial infections without antibiotics, which would prevent the development of antibiotic resistance...
- Login to post comments
More And More Infections In Europe Can Evade The Most Powerful Antibiotics
More and more infections in Europe are proving able to evade even the most powerful, last-resort antibiotics, posing an alarming threat to patient safety in the region, health officials said on Monday...
- Login to post comments
More Hospitals Are Ditching Antibiotics In The Meat They Serve
Concern about the livestock industry's overuse of antibiotics has led a number of health care institutions to start choosing meat from animals raised without antibiotics whenever they can. According to Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit that's helping the health care industry on this issue, more than 400 U.S. hospitals are working toward a goal of making 20 percent of their meat purchases "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to antibiotic-free.
- Login to post comments
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...
- Login to post comments
New Light-Activated Nanoparticles Kill Over 90% of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing problem around the world, responsible for some 2 million infections in the US each year that lead to approximately 23,000 deaths. But a new nanoparticle treatment developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder could provide an effective means of fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria including Salmonella, E. Coli, and Staphylococcus, based on results in a laboratory environment. In testing with a lab-grown culture, the nanoparticles killed 92 percent of drug-resistant bacterial cells while leaving the other cells intact...
- Login to post comments
New Study Is an Advance Toward Preventing a ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’
UCLA’s Elif Tekin, Casey Beppler, Pamela Yeh and Van Savage are gaining insights into why certain groups of three antibiotics interact well together and others don’t. A landmark report by the World Health Organization in 2014 observed that antibiotic resistance — long thought to be a health threat of the future — had finally become a serious threat to public health around the world. A top WHO official called for an immediate and aggressive response to prevent what he called a “post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill”...- Login to post comments
New Superbug Resistant To All Antibiotics Now Found Worldwide
Last week, I shared scary news of a new gene called mcr-1 conferring resistance to our last-ditch antibiotic, colistin. The gene was found in China with spread to the Netherlands. I raised concerns, too, about imports of some foods from China. Several new reports in the Lancet Infectious Diseases suggest the spread of this newly found resistance gene, mcr-1, is far worse than it initially appeared. Here are the latest findings from several just-released studies...
- Login to post comments
Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
- Login to post comments
Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
- Login to post comments
Predicting Antibiotic Resistance
Treating bacterial infections with antibiotics is becoming increasingly difficult as bacteria develop resistance not only to the antibiotics being used against them, but also to ones they have never encountered before. By analyzing genetic and phenotypic changes in antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli, researchers at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) in Japan have revealed a common set of features that appear to be responsible for the development of resistance to several types of antibiotics...
- Login to post comments
Predicting Superbugs' Countermoves To New Drugs
Duke University researchers used software they developed to predict a constantly-evolving infectious bacterium's countermoves to one of these new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients. In a study appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team used their program to identify the genetic changes that will allow methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, to develop resistance to a class of new experimental drugs that show promise against the deadly bug.
- Login to post comments
Promising Antibiotic Discovered In Microbial "Dark Matter"
Potential drug kills pathogens such as MRSA—and was discovered by mining "unculturable" bacteria...
- Login to post comments