Bugs Behaving Badly (Antibiotics are aging, and bacteria are learning to fight them off)

US News ^ | 10 Jan 2006 | Avery Comarow

[Ben Mugged]

Last month brought fresh evidence that while small, bacteria can certainly look out for themselves. Clostridium difficile, a microbe that can cause serious digestive illness and death in vulnerable patients in hospitals and nursing homes but rarely bothers healthy adults outside healthcare settings, was blamed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for doing just that in four states. Like many other germs, it apparently had mutated, under pressure from antibiotics, into a toxic new strain.

~snip~ Military service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly are coming home with Acinetobacter baumannii, a potent microbe that causes pneumonia and blood infections, in their wounds. Plucked straight from soil or water, the bug is naturally resistant, often to multiple antibiotics. Sometimes physicians have to turn to coliston, a drug rarely used since the 1960s because of the high chance of injuring the kidneys and nervous system.

Gonorrhea used to be easily treatable with penicillin, but the bacterium reponsible, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, long ago shrugged it off. Now the newer quinolone class of antibiotics such as Cipro and Floxin, which became the drugs of choice, are being defeated in the United States and in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and Hong Kong.

Resistant strains of bacteria usually confined to hospitals are finding their way into local communities. In 2003 and 2005, studies fingered Staphylococcus aureus, a microbe that is blamed for many serious heart and lung infections in hospitals and nursing homes and is resistant to the methicillin class of anti-biotics, as the cause of outbreaks of skin abscesses in high school wrestlers in Indiana, members of a Colorado fencing club, and five players on the St. Louis Rams football team.

[MRMEAN]

But the flow of unique new classes of antibiotics ebbed and died in the 1960s. Resistant strains of microbes that had crumbled obediently at the touch of drugs like vancomycin appeared. Now some 2 million hospital patients a year get bacterial infections; about 90,000 of them die. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases estimates that more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause these infections are resistant to one or more antibiotics. That complicates care, inflating the cost of treating an infected patient...

Why few new antibiotics are emerging, says George Talbot, a task force member and consultant to drug manufacturers, is simple: "Big companies decided that there are more fertile fields. They needed to have blockbuster drugs." Antibiotics are expensive to develop--putting a new one on the market would cost at least $800 million and take as long as 10 years--and offer a lower return than that offered by medications for chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, Alzheimer's, and depression.<

In 1962 Congress passed the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments "to ensure drug efficacy and greater drug safety. For the first time, drug manufacturers are required to prove to FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them." (from the FDA website.) This has greatly increased the costs of developing new drugs, and greatly delays the introduction of new drugs on the market, and increased the risks of developing and marketing new drugs. As a result fewer new drugs are developed, and when they are drug consumers have to wait many years to receive their benefits...all due to the scare of Thalidomide, which was never approved for use in the United States anyway.

Millions of Americans have died prematurely or have suffered worse health than they could have. Rather than focus on "safety and efficacy"--legal constructs, pharmaceutical developers, doctors, and drug consumers should be allowed to make choices as to risks and rewards. No drug is perfectly safe, but a physician may decide that the potential benefits of the drug outweigh its potential risks. These are choices that doctors and patients should make, not the FDA.

[Born to Conserve]

"Who was arguing otherwise?"

See post #3.

[mlc9852]

Oh, I see.

[Danette]

I started getting pnuemonia 1-2 times a year since 1994. I got the pnuemonia vaccine in 2003 and haven't had it since. The vaccine lasts the rest of your life (I hope).

[jec41]

I started getting pnuemonia 1-2 times a year since 1994. I got the pnuemonia vaccine in 2003 and haven't had it since. The vaccine lasts the rest of your life (I hope).


It was supposed to last the rest of your life, however there are different strains and they now advise that you get the shot every three years.

[sandbar]

>>>I started getting pnuemonia 1-2 times a year since 1994. I got the pnuemonia vaccine in 2003 and haven't had it since. The vaccine lasts the rest of your life (I hope). >>>

I will check into it immediately!

[Deguello]

"if it can be avoided"

Read the label of any product in your household that says "Antibacterial".

[Blood of Tyrants]

No, the weaker strains no longer have to compete for food.

[Blood of Tyrants]

P.S. Our immune system can handle a few, but are overwhelmed by many.

[null and void]

Sooooooo our immune systems don't handle the infection of the weaker bugs when it's starting with only a few of them?

Why did God do it that way?

[js1138]

Once again, the bacteria are not mutating. It is just that the stronger strains have always been resistant to drugs

Explain how this happens when an experiment starts with a single bacterium. Duh.

[MamaTexan]

What everyone seems to be overlooking are the EXTERNAL antibiotics.

Antibacterial soaps, deodorants, sanitizers, etc. kill almost EVERYTHING..including the weaker bacteria that help our immune systems become stronger. The weaker bacteria die, and the stronger bacteria survive to reproduce.

The problem is these broad spectrum compounds are NO LONGER restricted to a medical setting. Advertisers have convinced the people that we must be germ-free, and now every house has antibacterial dish detergent, hand sanitizers, and germ killers of every sort. (and that doesn't even include the preservatives that also act like antibacterials.)

The most common household antibacterial ingredient, Triclosan, is actually *Diphenyl Ether*. Both 'ether' and 'phenyl' are alcohols.

I wound up having to learn more about anti-microbials and preservatives in soap and disposable gloves than I ever really wanted to know, because I've suddenly become allergic to them.

Believe me...everyone should educate themselves to what the FDA allows manufacturers to put in what are refereed to as 'personal care' items.

Particularly since the only regulation on the cosmetics industry IS the cosmetics industry!

Here's an place called Skin Deep

And another called What's in the stuff we buy?

This is the for the Household Products Database National Library of Medicine.

As my Doctor recently said.... We're cleaning ourselves to death!

[Blood of Tyrants]

A single bacterium will either be immune to the antibiotic from the beginning or it will die. Duh!

[Voltage]

Hopefully the Chinese drug companies can develop and sell us the drugs we need...after our lawyers drive our drug companies out of business...might not be that long.

[Rebel_Ace]

"(1) Explain how this happens when an experiment starts with a single bacterium..."

"(2) A single bacterium will either be immune to the antibiotic from the beginning or it will die. Duh!"

Either you are just joshing with him, or you really don't understand what is going on.

Experiments that start with a SINGLE BACTERIUM begin by growing a "culture", which is to say, zillions of the little critters, since they reproduce by fission.

If there were NO MUTATIONS as you suggest, at the end of growing the culture, you would have zillions of exact copies, and following that line to it's logical conclusion, they would either be immune to an anti-biotic under test, or they would all die.

SURPRISE! That is NOT what happens!. The copies are NOT all identical. There are errors in copying DNA strings. Most produce either no noticable effect, due to some interesting "error correction" in the sequencing for proteins. However, some produce beneficial changes, while others produce harmful ones.

What do we get? SOME bacteria are MORE RESISTANT to the anti-biotic under test, and live long enough to reproduce, thus transferring the beneficial trait on to the next generation.

It is TEXTBOOK evolution, in experimental form, repeatable as often as you care to.