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OSLO, Norway – Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner. Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked. The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

US scientists are targeting an enzyme essential to bacterial metabolism in the search for new antibiotics.Michael Burkart of the University of California, San Diego, and Anton Simeonov from the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, and coworkers have developed a high-throughput kinetic assay to screen small molecules as inhibitors of surfactin-type phosphopantetheinyl transferase (Sfp-PPTase) enzymes.Transferases are among a group of enzymes that can add and remove groups from proteins after their polypeptide backbone has been built - a process known as posttranslational modification. The enzymes are of biological and pharmaceutical interest as their inhibitors have been suggested as avenues for antibacterial,...

People are less likely to get antibiotics for respiratory infections Since the mid-1990s, doctors have written fewer antibiotic prescriptions per year for respiratory infections, a new survey shows. The drop in these prescriptions in the United States per thousand people from 1995 to 2006 is 36 percent in children under age 5 and 18 percent among persons age 5 and up, researchers report in the Aug. 19 Journal of the American Medical Association. Many respiratory infections do not typically require antibiotics, including influenza, viral pneumonia, bronchitis, laryngitis, common colds and other infections caused by viruses. Infections more deserving of antibiotics...

Australian pharmaceutical firm, Biota, has said that Phase III trials of its new influenza drug laninamivir (CS-8958) have shown that a single inhaled dose of the drug was as effective as 10 doses of Roche’s Tamiflu administered orally over a 5 day period. The drug is a second generation neuraminidase inhibitor and is based on zanamivir, the active ingredient in Relenza, which Biota sold to GlaxoSmithKline. The study was conducted by Japanese pharma firm Daiichi Sankyo, which co-owns the drug, and included 1000 patients that had confirmed, naturally acquired influenza A or B. Preclinical studies have shown laninamivir to be...

The highest resolution snapshots yet showing how bacteria adapt to survive treatment with quinolone drugs are giving drug makers an additional weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Scientists at King's College London and St. George's, University of London, have shown exactly how quinolones, which are the second line of defence against diseases like pneumonia and meningitis, interact with their topoisomerase IV enzyme target. The researchers captured detailed crystal structures using high power x-rays produced at the Diamond synchrotron in the UK and its French counterpart, Soleil. From these images the team has been able to identify the amino acids that mutate...

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have demonstrated a more effective treatment for bacterial pneumonia following influenza. They found that the antibiotics clindamycin and azithromycin, which kill bacteria by inhibiting their protein synthesis, are more effective than a standard first-line treatment with the "beta-lactam" antibiotic ampicillin, which causes the bacteria to lyse, or burst. The finding is important because pneumonia, rather than the influenza itself, is a principal cause of death from influenza in children and the elderly. During pandemics—such as the one that may arise from avian influenza—up to 95 percent of influenza deaths are due to pneumonia....

Earlier this year, Harold and Freda Mitchell of Como, Miss., both came down with a serious stomach bug. At first, doctors did not know what was wrong, but the gastrointestinal symptoms became so severe that Mrs. Mitchell, 66, was hospitalized for two weeks. Her husband, a manufacturing supervisor, missed 20 days of work. A local doctor who had worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital recognized the signs of Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly bacterium. Although the illness is difficult to track, health officials estimate that in the United States the bacteria cause 350,000 infections each year in hospitals...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A bill that would ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animals would hurt the health of livestock and poultry while compromising efforts to protect the safety of the country's food supply, the leader of the largest U.S. farm group said on Tuesday. Bob Stallman, president of the 6 million-member American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a letter to Congress that its members "carefully, judiciously and according to label instructions" use antibiotics to treat, prevent and control disease in animals. "Antibiotic use in animals does not pose a serious public health threat," said Stallman, who urged lawmakers...

For a full list of the 36 generic antibiotics offered for free by Stop & Shop, visit www.stopandshop.com/antibiotics Beginning Friday, Stop & Shop Supermarket pharmacies will offer free antibiotics to anyone with a doctor's prescription, a program the company says will help maintain the health of its customers in "a difficult economy." The director of Saint Mary's Health System's infectious disease and infection control department, however, says the program is misguided. The company, with headquarters in Quincy, Mass., has 251 stores with pharmacies in the Northeast. It announced this week it will offer a free 14-day supply for any of...

Giving antibiotics to patients in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) to prevent – rather than fight – bacterial infections may reduce the number of patient deaths, Dutch scientists report today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Despite the findings, some researchers remain skeptical whether the possible risks (most notably spurring new antibiotic resistant germs) outweigh the benefits of plying patients with antibiotics instead of using other more benign strategies such as hand-washing, isolating contagious patients and scrubbing hospitals with antiseptic cleansers.

MRSA, a drug-resistant germ, lurks in Washington hospitals, carried by patients and staff and fueled by inconsistent infection control. This stubborn germ is spreading here at an alarming rate, but no one has tracked these cases -- until now. Year after year, the number of victims climbed. But even as casualties mounted -- as the germ grew stronger and spread inside hospitals-- the toll remained hidden from the public, and hospitals ignored simple steps to control the threat. Over the past decade, the number of Washington hospital patients infected with a frightening, antibiotic-resistant germ called MRSA has skyrocketed from 141...

New England Tom Brady has undergone two more procedures to clean out infection on his surgically repaired knee, the Boston Herald reported. The newspaper said Brady is on a six-week course of intravenous antibiotics and will have follow-up exams at the clinic where he had the surgery.

HONEY, used for generations to soothe sore throats, could soon be substituted for antibiotics in fighting stubborn ear, nose and throat infections, according to a new study. Ottawa University doctors found in tests that ordinary honey kills bacteria that cause sinus infections, and does it better in most cases than antibiotics. The researchers have so far tested manuka honey from New Zealand, and sidr honey from Yemen. "It's astonishing," researcher Joseph Marson said of bees' unexplained ability to combine the nectar of flowers into a seemingly potent medicine. The preliminary tests were conducted in laboratory dishes, not in live patients,...

'Time-travelling' bugs resist antibiotics of the future 12:42 06 June 2008 NewScientist.com news service Ewen Callaway Bacteria lurking in soil in the 1960s and 70s resist an antibiotic that didn't exist until decades later. Three strains of what amount to future-predicting bacteria showed extreme resistance to six common antibiotics, including ciprofloxacin, which was first sold in 1989. "You can pretty safely say that there is no way these bacteria have seen them before," says Cristiane San Miguel, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, US. She presented the findings this week at the American Society for Microbiology's...

Researchers hunting for new antibiotics might get some aid from gator blood. Scientists are zeroing in on snippets of proteins found in American alligator blood that kill a wide range of disease-causing microbes and bacteria, including the formidable MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Previous experiments have revealed that gator blood extract cripples many human pathogens, including E. coli, the herpes simplex virus and some strains of the yeast Candida albicans. The serum's antimicrobial power probably derives from protein bits called peptides. Widespread among reptiles and amphibians, several such germ-fighting peptides have been isolated from the skin of frogs in recent...

AP Medical Writer Antibiotics for breakfast? The drugs are supposed to kill bacteria, not feed them. Yet Harvard researchers have discovered hundreds of germs in soil that literally gobble up antibiotics, able to thrive with the potent drugs as their sole source of nutrition. These bacteria outwit antibiotics in a disturbingly novel way, and now the race is on to figure out just how they do it - in case more dangerous germs that sicken people could develop the same ability. On the other hand, the work explains why the soil doesn't harbor big antibiotic buildups despite use of the...

You can’t help but feel a little sorry for Amanda Beck. She’s a reporter from Reuters who was among the first to cover a new study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which warns about an outbreak of a virulent, drug-resistant, and potentially deadly strain of Staph infection afflicting certain segments of the homosexual community. Although outbreaks of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, have primarily been confined to hospitals in the past, the study determined that, due to “high risk behaviors” beyond hospital walls — such as “anal sex” — men who have sex with men...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 /Christian Newswire/ -- Because Concerned Women for America (CWA) cares deeply for the health and well being of all Americans, CWA is sending letters inviting the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLAAD and Lambda Legal to put aside profound ideological differences with CWA — for the sake of the lives and health of their members — and to call for commonsense steps to help curb the spread of a potentially deadly strain of Staph infection. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA bacteria, is infecting men who have sex with men in major...

Scientists Strike Blow In Superbugs Struggle ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2007) — Scientists from The University of Manchester have pioneered new ways of tweaking the molecular structure of antibiotics -- an innovation that could be crucial in the fight against powerful super bugs. The work was led by chemical biologist Dr Jason Micklefield in collaboration with geneticist Professor Colin Smith. Scientists working in The School of Chemistry and the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre have paved the way for the development of new types of antibiotics capable of fighting increasingly resistant bacteria. Micklefield, Smith and colleagues were the first to engineer the biosynthesis...

(BEIJING)--The medicine cabinet in the average U.S. home is filling with drugs made in China, and some experts say that could be a prescription for trouble. China’s booming pharmaceutical industry has doubled exports to the United States in the past five years, undercutting competitors and making American consumers reliant on the safety of Chinese factories and captive to any disruptions in Sino-U.S. commerce. It might seem like merely a trade issue. But industry experts in Europe and the United States say that national security concerns are edging into the debate. Consider this scenario: If a major anthrax attack were to...