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If you’re searching for a deadly infection, look no further than your local fast-food soda fountain. A survey of the water dispensed from soda fountains in fast food restaurants revealed that a shocking 41% of them were contaminated with coliform bacteria, an indicator of water impurity. Further analysis showed that the water was contaminated with some of the deadliest “superbug” germs known to science. These include antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Campylobacter jejuni, as well as listeria, salmonella and E. coli.

An Oregon hospital is reporting an outbreak of a superbug fungus that has hospitalized three people in the state, health officials said. Oregon on Tuesday confirmed three cases of Candida auris at a hospital in Salem, the state capital. The first case was detected on Dec. 11, according to the Oregon Health Authority. The second case was confirmed on Dec. 23 and the third Dec. 27. Federal, state and local health officials are investigating the outbreak. C. auris is a type of yeast fungus that is difficult to detect and is heavily resistant to drugs, making treatment of infected patients...

Scientists have developed a “living medicine” that has the capability to kill the hospital superbug MRSA. Experiments on mice found it destroyed biofilms of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. The revolutionary treatment could make its way to patients within two years. “Our technology, based on synthetic biology and live biotherapeutics, has been designed to meet all safety and efficacy standards for application in the lung, with respiratory diseases being one of the first targets. Our next challenge is to address high-scale production and manufacturing, and we expect to start clinical trials in 2023,” says study leader Dr. María Lluch of the...

The latest scare headlines warn us that a super-contagious strain of the Wuhan virus has emerged in England and is breaking free into the rest of the world. You can already hear the Chicken Littles running around screaming, "We're all going to die." It turns out, though, that the data are based upon a very preliminary, almost certainly inaccurate, study from the same Imperial College London group that started the original panic about a coming plague worse than the Black Death. Some time ago, when appearing on Tucker Carlson, Mark Steyn said British prime minister Boris Johnson's brush with the...

A killer germ is raging through some New York hospitals and nursing homes. But public health officials are deliberately keeping the public in the dark about it. New York state is ground zero for this germ, called Candida auris. Over half the nearly 600 cases nationwide are right here, mostly in New York City. New Jersey hospitals are also hard hit, with more than 100 cases so far. A staggering 45 percent of patients who get it die within 90 days. It’s especially dangerous because once it gets inside a hospital, it spreads. Patients with Candida auris shed it from...

Tamika Capone thought she was making a smart call by traveling to Mexico for bariatric surgery. Her doctor had urged her to have the procedure to reduce her out-of-control weight and blood pressure. But her husband’s health insurance would not cover the $17,500 bill. After a friend got the surgery in Tijuana for $4,000, Capone decided to do the same. Nearly four months later, the Arkansas woman is one of at least a dozen U.S. residents who returned from surgeries in Tijuana with a rare and potentially deadly strain of bacteria resistant to virtually all antibiotics, say federal health officials....

According to researchers, the antibiotic-resistant organism is a local public health threat. APH investigated 37 cases of Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae — or CRE — at Austin-area medical facilities in 2017, with 18 of those being Travis County residents. "Healthy people usually do not get CRE infections – they usually happen to patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare settings," the Centers for Disease Control wrote on its website about CRE. Patients who use ventilators, catheters or those who take antibiotics for a prolonged period of time are most at risk, the CDC said. Individuals can make sure to wash their...

amika Capone thought she was making a smart call by traveling to Mexico for bariatric surgery. Her doctor had urged her to have the procedure to reduce her out-of-control weight and blood pressure. But her husband's health insurance would not cover the $17,500 bill. After a friend got the surgery in Tijuana for $4,000, Capone decided to do the same.

Staphylococcus aureus - Antibiotics Test plate. Credit: CDC _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ An antibiotic overlooked since its discovery 40 years ago could help develop new drugs against life-threatening infections caused by some of the world's most dangerous superbugs. University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) researchers synthesised the antibiotic, and increased its effectiveness against extensively drug-resistant bacteria, then collaborated with Monash University to evaluate the drug using animal models of infection. Professor Matt Cooper, Director of IMB's Centre for Superbug Solutions, said the study was prompted by the urgent need for new drugs to counter widespread resistance to last-resort treatments. "Octapeptins...

Here’s harrowing news for the sexually active: sexually transmitted diseases are getting out of control. In its annual STD Surveillance Report, the Center for Disease Control saw a record increase in the number of infections of three sexually transmitted diseases in the U.S. -- chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. Syphilis, in particular, is seeing massive outbreaks in places like Fresno, CA, where the disease was almost nonexistent six years ago, according to The Fresno Bee. In July, the World Health Organization issued a warning about the global rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea. That’s the one that produces a burning sensation and a...

A 'superbug' fungus is emerging as a new menace in U.S. hospitals, mostly in New York and New Jersey. First identified in Japan in 2009, the fungus has spread to more than a dozen countries around the globe. The oldest of the 66 cases reported in the U.S. dates back to 2013, but most were reported in the last year. The fungus called Candida auris is a harmful form of yeast. Scientists say it can be hard to identify with standard lab tests. U.S. health officials sounded alarms last year because two of the three kinds of commonly used antifungal...

Going into a hospital? It's getting riskier because of drug-resistant infections -- the kind almost no drug can cure. Despite one federal government "action plan" after another, the germs are winning. Government authorities are clueless about how many infections there are, or how many patients are dying. Alarming new research shows that one of the deadliest families of bugs, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, nicknamed CRE, may actually be striking three times more patients than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us. One lesson from the war against AIDS: Level with the public about the enormity of a problem if you...

<p>The specific strain of CRE, known as Klebsiella pneumoniae, was isolated from one of her wounds in August.</p> <p>Tests were negative for the mcr-1 gene—a great concern to health experts because it makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, colistin.</p>

Fifteen years after the U.S. declared drug-resistant infections to be a grave threat, the crisis is only worsening, a Reuters investigation finds, as government agencies remain unwilling or unable to impose reporting requirements on a healthcare industry that often hides the problem. According to their death certificates, Emma Grace Breaux died at age 3 from complications of the flu; Joshua Nahum died at age 27 from complications related to a skydiving accident; and Dan Greulich succumbed to cardiac arrhythmia at age 64 after a combined kidney and liver transplant. In each case – and in others Reuters found – death...

Scientists have discovered a mcr-1 "superbug" gene in a sample of E.coli bacteria from a New York patient, making it the second reported case of superbug infection in the United States.According to a report from Reuters, the discovery was made after the researchers analyzed 13,525 Escherichia coli and 7,481 Klebsiella pneumoniae strains from patients collected last year as part of the global effort called the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program. These patients came from hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, Europe and North America. Out of the thousands of analyzed strains, about 1.9 percent or 390 were resistant to colistin,...

For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean "the end of the road" for antibiotics. The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery "heralds the...

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...

An ancient concoction for eye infections seems to really work. The potion, which contains cattle bile, kills the "superbug" methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham report. In fact, it worked better than the current gold standard for MRSA infections of the flesh, the antibiotic vancomycin, an expert at Texas Tech University found. Now researchers are working to see just what's in the salve that kills germs so effectively. It started with a joint project by two wildly different departments at the University of Nottingham. Dr. Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert in the School of English,...

It took UCLA Medical Center officials more than a month to link the hospital's first patient infected with a drug-resistant bacteria to the medical scopes at the center of an outbreak that killed two people and infected at least five others, hospital officials disclosed.Officials said they began investigating the source of the superbug when the first infected patient was discovered in mid-December. It wasn’t until Jan. 28 -- after extensive testing -- that doctors positively linked the bacteria to the medical scopes.On Thursday morning, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to hospitals and medical providers that a commonly...

A potentially deadly "superbug" resistant to antibiotics infected seven patients, including two who died, and nearly 200 others were exposed at a Southern California hospital through contaminated medical instruments, UCLA reported Wednesday.