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Epidemiologists — people who track diseases — use an expression: Seek and ye shall find. It's a reminder that sometimes when you see a phenomenon, it may not be entirely new. It may be that you've only just noticed it. Well, the world seems to be having a major seek-and-ye-shall-find moment right now with a worrisome new superbug. In late December, reports emerged that the mcr-1 gene, which confers resistance to an important antibiotic of last-resort, has been found in bacteria previously collected in the Netherlands, Laos, Algeria, Thailand, and France. There is reason to believe it may also be...

The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - in patients and livestock in China. They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.

An alliance of consumer, health, and environmental groups have released a new report showing how the nation's top 25 fast food companies by sales stack up on their policies regarding antibiotic use in their meat. The results are dismal: The report gave 20 of the 25 companies failing grades for not effectively responding to a "growing public health threat by publicly adopting policies restricting routine antibiotic use" in meat.

Researchers have figured out how to get yeast to produce morphine, codeine and other similar drugs and have immediately urged regulators to control these drug-brewing yeasts before people start trying to make them at home. They genetically engineered simple brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and came up with a strain that can make very complicated plant compounds that include opioid drugs such as morphine, as well as some antibiotics and muscle relaxants. It's an important technical step, because now these drugs have to be synthesized directly from plants—an inefficient process. The yeast process isn't that efficient yet, either, but once it's...

Fans of homebrewed beer and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. But a research team led by bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, has gone much further by completing key steps needed to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing morphine and potentially other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer therapeutics. Over the past decade, a handful of synthetic-biology labs have been working on replicating in microbes a complex, 15-step chemical pathway in the poppy plant to enable production of therapeutic drugs. Research teams have independently recreated different sections of the...

Abstract Here, we propose a new strategy for the treatment of early cancerous lesions and advanced metastatic disease, via the selective targeting of cancer stem cells (CSCs), a.k.a., tumor-initiating cells (TICs). We searched for a global phenotypic characteristic that was highly conserved among cancer stem cells, across multiple tumor types, to provide a mutation-independent approach to cancer therapy. This would allow us to target cancer stem cells, effectively treating cancer as a single disease of “stemness”, independently of the tumor tissue type. Using this approach, we identified a conserved phenotypic weak point – a strict dependence on mitochondrial biogenesis for...

Kate Kelland, Reuters December 10, 2014LONDON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Drug-resistant superbugs could kill an extra 10 million people a year and cost up to $100 trillion by 2050 if their rampant global spread is not halted, according to a British government-commissioned review. Such infections already kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and the trend is growing, the review said, adding: "The importance of effective antimicrobial drugs cannot be overplayed." Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill, who led the work, noted that in Europe and the United States alone around 50,000 people currently die each year from...

A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is quietly sweeping India, and among its many victims are tens of thousands of newborns dying because once-miraculous cures no longer work. These infants are born with bacterial infections that are resistant to most known antibiotics, and more than 58,000 died last year as a result, a recent study found. While that is still a fraction of the nearly 800,000 newborns who die annually in India, Indian pediatricians say that the rising toll of resistant infections could soon swamp efforts to improve India's abysmal infant death rate. Nearly a third of the...

Giovanni was one of the 6 million children in the United States who suffer from food allergies, an alarming number that has nearly tripled in the past two decades. Dr. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist and professor at New York University, is working tirelessly on groundbreaking research into this dramatic spike in food allergies. His hypothesis is that exposure to antibiotics early in life is diminishing positive gut bacteria and thus weakening children's immune systems, making them more susceptible to allergies. Blaser warns parents: "Antibiotics are not free, they do have a cost. And it is not just monetary but in...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have made a breakthrough in the race to solve antibiotic resistance. New research published today in the journal Nature reveals an Achilles’ heel in the defensive barrier which surrounds drug-resistant bacterial cells. The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill superbugs by bringing down their defensive walls rather than attacking the bacteria itself. It means that in future, bacteria may not develop drug-resistance at all. The discovery doesn’t come a moment too soon. The World Health Organization has warned that antibiotic-resistance in bacteria is spreading globally, causing severe...

... The good news, according to Goldberg, is that this isn’t a hard threat to combat, but he said there are unnecessary hurdles blocking an effective response and putting lives in danger. “We need to take the chains off companies that would otherwise develop antibiotics but aren’t because it’s too expensive or too complicated to do so,” said Goldberg, who then elaborated on the federally imposed hurdles facing drug makers. ... So what needs to happen to relax federal restraints on drug makers? ...

Officials from the World Health Organization warned this week that the workhorse medications we rely on to keep viruses, bacteria and other pathogens in check are in real danger of becoming obsolete. In every region of the globe, health officials have witnessed “very high rates of resistance” to antimicrobial drugs designed to fight bugs like Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae, according to a new report. These bugs cause pneumonia and infections in the bloodstream, open wounds and the urinary tract.

You never get something for nothing, especially not in health care. Every test, every incision, every little pill brings benefits and risks. Nowhere is that balance tilting more ominously in the wrong direction than in the once halcyon realm of infectious diseases, that big success story of the 20th century. We have had antibiotics since the mid-1940s — just about as long as we have had the atomic bomb, as Dr. Martin J. Blaser points out — and our big mistake was failing long ago to appreciate the parallels between the two. Antibiotics have cowed many of our old bacterial...

LESS THAN A CENTURY AGO, the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes was transformed not by a gene, but by an idea. The antibiotic revolution inaugurated the era of modern medicine, trivializing once-deadly infections and paving the way for medical breakthroughs: organ transplants and chemotherapy would be impossible without the ability to eliminate harmful bacteria seemingly at will. But perhaps every revolution contains the seeds for its own undoing, and antibiotics are no exception: antibiotic resistance—the rise of bacteria impervious to the new “cure”—has followed hard on the heels of each miracle drug. Recently, signs have arisen that the...

Washington (AFP) - Cow manure, commonly used to fertilize vegetable crops, contains a high number of genes that can fuel resistance to antibiotics, a US study out Tuesday found. These genes come from the cows' gut bacteria, and while none have yet been found in superbugs that are infecting humans, researchers said the potential is real. The research was done by scientists at Yale University, who sampled manure from a handful of dairy cows at a farm in Connecticut. In those samples, they found 80 unique antibiotic resistance genes. About three quarters were unfamiliar. Genetic sequencing showed they were only...

Farmers intentionally feed chicken and other livestock antibiotics to increase their size. But antibiotics may be doing the same thing to you posits Dr. Oz in a new episode of The Dr. Oz Show that takes a look at why antibiotics may be making you fat and could be the cause of your obesity. “Today I’ve got breaking news. Experts are uncovering the hidden reason behind America’s obesity problem: Could you be gaining weight because of antibiotics that you take every day for problems like sore throats and earaches? Or from antibiotics found in our food? It’s an alarming finding,...

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration says 25 pharmaceutical companies are voluntarily phasing out the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals processed for meat. Citing a potential threat to public health, the agency in December asked 26 companies to voluntarily stop labeling drugs important for treating human infection as acceptable for use in animal production. The FDA did not name the one company that has not agreed to withdraw or revise its drugs...

I had a bacterial pneumonia over this last week. It manifested as flu-like symptoms, at first: Low-grade fever, dizziness, chills, then sweats, and a constant fatigue. I thought nothing of it for the first day, having been the self-administered victim of minor food-poisoning before. However, this illness didn't seem to want to pass. By the second day, Sunday, I became more anxious as to the true cause of the malady. It was less likely to be a true influenza, because I had received a flu vaccine shot this year. So what was it? I almost thought to get to the...

The Golden Age of Antibiotics is Over!! Exclusive: Limited Time Coast to Coast Listeners... Sign Up Below to Get One of My Best Selling eBooks for FREE! Secure & Confidential WE GURANTEE YOUR PRIVACY. We hate spam as much as you do. For 60 years we have lived protected by these CURE ALL drugs. Lives have been saved… Billions of lives. True, there have been complications, but that's because of abuse, not because of the wonderful life-saving properties of antibiotics. But NOW it's over: Antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are spreading like wildfire. There are dozens of deadly antibiotic resistant...

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely? A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing. It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the...