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A sharp jump in the number of rare but potentially deadly types of a superbug resistant to nearly all last-resort antibiotics has prompted government health officials to renew warnings for U.S. hospitals, nursing homes and other health care settings. The move comes just as researchers in Israel are reporting that people colonized with dangerous CRE -- Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae -- can take more than a year before they test negative for the bacteria, making it more difficult to control -- and raising the risk of wider spread. Reports of unusual forms of CRE have nearly doubled in the U.S., the Centers...

In an average year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 21 million Americans get the norovirus, with classic stomach flu symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea. Eight hundred die. Symptoms come on very suddenly, within hours after a person has been exposed to it. Because no one has immunity to this new strain, more Americans — perhaps 50 percent more, the CDC says — could become violently ill. While the flu is spread mostly in the air by sneezes and coughs and a person needs to breathe in as many as 1,000 virus particles to get...

A deadly bacteria known as Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, is raising concerns in the medical community. Jennifer Hsu in an Infectious Disease Physician at Sanford Health and has been closely studying this 'super bug' which is best known for it's ability to defy even the strongest of drugs. “What has happened over time with increasing exposure to antibiotics the bacteria have developed ways to evade those antibiotics and they become resist to a certain class of antibiotics,” said Hsu. In the United States, the bacteria have been found primarily in healthcare facilities and hospitals and are known to prey on...

A deadly, drug-resistant superbug outbreak that began last summer at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center claimed its seventh victim Sept. 7, when a seriously ill boy from Minnesota succumbed to a bloodstream infection, officials said Friday. The boy was the 19th patient at the research hospital to contract an antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae that arrived in August 2011 with a New York woman who needed a lung transplant. But his case marked the first new infection of this superbug at NIH since January — a worrisome signal that the bug persists inside the huge brick-and-glass...

A deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics has killed a seventh person at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland.

Ron Fouchier, a giant of a man at more than two meters tall (6'6"), has dark circles under his eyes. His life has been stressful lately. "They want to paint me as a homicidal idiot," he says heatedly. He is referring, most of all, to a powerful institution from the United States, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB). … Fouchier is attracting so much attention because he has created a new organism. And although it is tiny, if it escaped from his laboratory it would claim far more human lives than an exploding nuclear power plant. The pathogen...

Hate insects? Afraid of germs? Researchers are reporting an alarming combination: bedbugs carrying a staph "superbug." Canadian scientists detected drug-resistant staph bacteria in bedbugs from three hospital patients from a downtrodden Vancouver neighborhood. Bedbugs have not been known to spread disease, and there's no clear evidence that the five bedbugs found on the patients or their belongings had spread the MRSA germ they were carrying or a second less dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. However, bedbugs can cause itching that can lead to excessive scratching. That can cause breaks in the skin that make people more susceptible to these germs, noted Dr....

Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease expert at Harbor UCLA Medical Center says there is no current teatment for CRKP bacteria — and there might not be any in the future either. County health officials warn the elderly are especially at risk of CRKP infections. (Getty Images) “There’s been a complete collapse in the development of new antibiotics over the last decade…and in the next decade there isn’t going to be anything that becomes available that’s going to be able to treat these bacteria,” said Spellberg. Medical expert Dr. David Baron of Primary Caring in Malibu cautions hospital visitors that...

A new superbug that is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics has entered UK hospitals, experts warn. They say bacteria which make an enzyme called NDM-1 travelled back with NHS patients who had gone abroad to countries like India and Pakistan for treatments such as cosmetic surgery. Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the UK so far, scientists fear it will go global. Tight surveillance and new drugs are needed says Lancet Infectious Diseases. NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of...

AUSTRALIAN air power has taken "a quantum leap forward" with the delivery of five F/A-18F Super Hornets yesterday. The five jets - the first of 24 - will tide the air force over until the arrival of the stealthy, fifth-generation F-35 joint strike fighter. They are the first new Royal Australian Air Force jets since 1985 and will be based at the Amberley air base, west of Brisbane. Speaking at the Super Hornets' official arrival yesterday, US Navy Rear Admiral Mark Skinner said the jets delivered new levels of "range, payload, lethality and survivability".

Nov. 2, 2009 (Philadelphia) -- A newly discovered strain of drug-resistant staph bacteria is five times more deadly than other strains, a new study suggests. Adding insult to injury, the new superbug appears to have some resistance to the antibiotic commonly used to treat it, researchers report. Half of patients infected with the new strain of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) died within 30 days, says Carol Moore, PharmD, a research investigator in infectious diseases at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. That compares to only about 10% of patients infected with other MRSA strains, she tells WebMD. Moore and colleagues studied...

A new strain of MRSA seems to be triggering a deadly form of pneumonia in people who catch flu, experts say.

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...

(NewsTarget) Nearly five percent of patients in U.S. hospitals may have acquired a particular antibiotic resistant staph infection, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers surveyed a total of 1,200 hospitals and other health care facilities from all 50 states, and found 8,000 patients infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) -- or 46 out of every 1,000. This suggests that up to 1.2 million hospital patients across the country may be infected every year. Colonized patients are those who were found to be carrying the bacteria in...

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...

Developing Kryptonite For Superbug ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2007) — University of Idaho researchers are crossing academic and geographical bounds to develop more effective defenses against Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and other deadly pathogens. One of the goals of that effort is to create much faster and more accurate identification of strains resistant to the antibiotic methicillin, formally known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Breakthrough detection technologies are already in hand in University of Idaho labs. Nanoelectronic biosensors at the university’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics and Biomolecular Research (CAMBR) recently have cut detection time for staph from the industry standard of...

Cold war weaponry to tackle superbugs By Gary Cleland Last Updated: 5:47pm GMT 28/10/2007 Technology developed to protect Britain from biological weapons is being redeployed into hospitals to help destroy superbugs. Among the first hospital trusts to install the air disinfection units will be Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, where at least 90 people died from the bug Clostridium difficile. The machines, first developed at the British defence establishment Porton Down in the 1960s, have been approved by an NHS ethics committee after trials at hospitals in Sunderland, Manchester and Carlisle. Tests showed the machines are capable of killing...

MRSA 'deadlier than bioweapons' Last Updated: 2:44am BST 23/10/2007 Superbugs such as MRSA pose a far greater threat to humanity than bioterrorism, a genetics pioneer claimed. Dr Venter warns of the superbug threat The warning came from Craig Venter, an American scientist currently working on a project which uses DNA building blocks to create the world's first synthetic life form. Critics argue that artificially-created microbes – bacteria which can cause disease – potentially pose a grave danger, by either invading the environment or being used to manufacture deadly bioweapons. But Dr Venter maintains that drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA are...

CHICAGO — More than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph "superbug," the government reported Tuesday in its first overall estimate of invasive disease caused by the germ. Deaths tied to these infections may exceed those caused by AIDS, said one public health expert commenting on the new study. The report shows just how far one form of the staph germ has spread beyond its traditional hospital setting. The overall incidence rate was about 32 invasive infections per 100,000 people. That's an "astounding" figure, said an editorial in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association,...

Appalling standards of care and a catalogue of failures contributed to the deaths of 331 patients in the worst outbreak of a hospital superbug ever recorded in the NHS, a report has found. Crowded wards, a shortage of nurses and financial problems led to 1,176 people contracting Clostridium difficile over two and half years at three hospitals in Kent. Though the superbug was rife on the wards, managers failed to act. Isolation units were not set up, nurses were so rushed they did not have time to wash their hands and patients were left in soiled beds. Bedpans were not...