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Doctors and patients should be on the lookout for symptoms of this worrying infection.A drug-resistant strain of bacteria is quickly becoming more common, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in a health alert. The bacteria, shigella, causes an infection called shigellosis that can come with gastrointestinal symptoms, like diarrhea and stomach cramps. An increasing percentage of shigella samples are turning out to be extensively resistant, meaning they have resistance to all five recommended antibiotic treatments, the CDC said. The news comes as norovirus, aka the stomach flu, is spreading the U.S. In 2015, no shigella infections were caused...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a “serious public health” alert, warning of a nationwide spike in “extensively drug-resistant” shigellosis. The highly contagious shigella bacterial infection attacks the intestines and causes inflammatory, sometimes bloody diarrhea, according to the CDC’s “emergency and preparedness response.” There are about 450,000 shigellosis infections every year in the US, resulting in an estimated $93 million in direct medical costs, according to CDC data. The agency also reported that 5% of all infections in 2022 were extensively drug-resistant (XDR) — a jump from zero drug-resistant cases in 2015. An infection is considered XDR...

In the eternal arms race between bacteria and antibiotics, deadly superbugs with resistance to humanity's most vital life-saving medicines continue to emerge and evolve. It's a growing crisis, but thankfully we are not entirely powerless against the scourge of antibiotic resistance. In medical scenarios where frontline treatments fail to help patients, doctors can turn to so-called drugs of last resort – treatments set aside until the eleventh hour has come, after prioritized therapies haven't worked out. Drugs of last resort may be held back for a number of reasons, including side effects, cost factors, patient considerations, and more. In the...

<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...

Antibiotic-resistant cases of the sexually transmitted illness gonorrhea have more than quadrupled in the United States. This new data, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, should serve as a warning that "the future of current treatment options may be in jeopardy," the agency said in a news release issued Thursday. "The confluence of emerging drug resistance and very limited alternative options for treatment creates a perfect storm for future gonorrhea treatment failure in the U.S.," said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, who directs the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention.

A female patient with an extremely hard-to-treat form of tuberculosis is being treated at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington D.C., and federal and state officials are now tracking down hundreds of people who may have been in contact with her. The woman traveled to at least three states before she sought treatment from a U.S. doctor. While TB is not easily caught by casual contact, extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB is so dangerous that health officials will have to make a concerted effort to warn anyone who may be at risk.

Recent outbreaks of an unpleasant intestinal illness in Massachusetts, California and Pennsylvania are due to a drug-resistant version of a bacteria that causes travelers' diarrhea, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned this week. Since May 2014, Shigella sonnei bacteria that have shown resistance to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin have sickened 243 people across 32 states and Puerto Rico, the federal agency said. "Research by the CDC found that the drug-resistant illness was being repeatedly introduced as ill travelers returned and was then infecting other people in a series of outbreaks around the country," the CDC explained. Shigellosis is often...

A drug-resistant intestinal illness called Shigellosis is spreading in the US for the first time, according to a CDC report released today... People infected with Shigellosis go through painful bouts of watery or bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain, and fever. It spreads quickly from person to person through food and recreational water, such as pools...But over the last year, international travelers returning to the US have repeatedly introduced the pathogen into the country.

The joke that's going around is that the Mayans got it wrong: The world is ending this year, not 2012. Here's the lates sign of that. A superbug is spreading around America, and has hit Southern California. LA Times: A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium has spread to patients in Southern California, according to a study by Los Angeles County public health officials. More than 350 cases of the Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, have been reported at healthcare facilities in Los Angeles County, mostly among elderly patients at skilled-nursing and long-term care facilities, according to a study by Dr. Dawn Terashita,...

4 at Duke get drug-resistant H1N1 By KEITH UPCHURCH DURHAM -- Four patients at Duke University Medical Center, all from North Carolina, have tested positive for a type of swine flu that's resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, and three have died, health officials announced Friday at a news conference in Raleigh. The fourth patient, a woman, is still a patient at Duke and ''is doing much better,'' they said. Although the four had the H1N1 virus, they all had other medical problems, so it's uncertain if the swine flu caused their deaths, they said. All four were in an...

Rangel, Levin, Emanuel, Van Hollen’s stance against Intellectual Property Rights will increase the risk of creating drug-resistant strains of the world’s most dangerous viruses. In addition it allows countries like Thailand to shift important healthcare spending to bolstering their politically present military.

Call it one price of globalism. Last year, tuberculosis increased in four of the Bay Area's five largest counties, and the San Jose area in 2006 had the highest TB rate of any large American metro area, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health. San Francisco, after an outbreak of TB among Latino day workers in the Mission district, has the highest TB rate of any...

Drug-resistant tuberculosis is spreading even faster than medical experts had feared, the World Health Organization warned in report issued Tuesday. The rate of TB patients infected with the drug-resistant strain topped 20 percent in some countries, the highest ever recorded, the U.N. agency said. Globally, there are about 500,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB every year, about 5 percent of the 9 million new TB cases. In the United States, 1.2 percent of TB cases were multi-drug resistant. Of those, 1.9 percent were extensively drug-resistant. There's a huge, gross discrepancy there if they are then reporting 25 percent of the...

'Flesh-eating' MRSA threatens Britain By Caroline Gammell and Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles Last Updated: 5:49pm GMT 15/01/2008 A potentially deadly and highly drug resistant strain of MRSA has developed which can lead to a flesh-eating form of pneumonia, researchers have warned. The USA300 strain is spreading outside hospitals into the general population Spreading rapidly among gay men in several major US cities, the bug can cause boils as large as tennis balls, blood poisoning or a necrotising condition which eats away at a person's lungs. The type of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) was identified in gay men in...

An attorney for a Phoenix man locked up in a hospital jail ward and treated like an inmate says her client has left the country. Doctors ruled recently that Robert Daniels was no longer contagious with tuberculosis after he underwent lung surgery while being treated at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center. He had been living in a Phoenix-area motel under monitoring by Maricopa County Public Health officials for the past few weeks. Attorney Linda Cosme said Daniels sent her an e-mail from Moscow after arriving there on a flight Sunday. "He apologized," Cosme said. "Essentially, he could not...

'This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've co-operated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy.'— Man with drug resistant TB says he returned to U.S. despite risks to get treatment A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 told a newspaper he took one trans-Atlantic flight for his wedding and honeymoon and another because he feared for his life. Hundreds of health authorities around the world including Canada are now scrambling to track down passengers who were seated near the...

A virulent strain of tuberculosis resistant to most available drugs is surfacing around the globe, raising fears of a pandemic that could devastate efforts to contain TB and prove deadly to people with immune-deficiency diseases such as HIV-AIDS. Known formally as extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, the strain has been detected in 37 countries. It arises when the bacterium that causes TB mutates because antibiotics used to combat it are carelessly administered by poorly trained doctors or patients don't take their full course of medication. Rather than being killed by the drugs, the microbe builds up resistance to them. At...

· Technique renders pathogens benign· Crop and animal diseases could also be targeted Scientists have taken a big step towards a new generation of antibiotics by designing compounds that stop bacteria "talking to each other", thwarting their ability to spread infection. The revolutionary approach renders bacteria benign rather than killing them off, and comes as many antibiotics are losing their potency against pathogens which have developed drug resistance.Tests showed the compounds actively blocked the spread of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common bacterium which causes fatal lung infections in people with cystic fibrosis and leads to life-threatening blood infections in patients with...

Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/ The Iraq Infection Matthew Herper, 08.02.05 NEW YORK - ; doctors are fighting to contain an outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria that apparently originated in the Iraqi soil. So far at least 280 people, mostly soldiers returning from the battlefield, have been infected, a number of whom contracted the illness while in U.S. military hospitals. Most of the victims are relatively young troops who were injured by the land mines, mortars and suicide bombs that have permeated the Iraq conflict. No active-duty soldiers have died from the infections, but five extremely sick patients who were in...