FDA Limits Usage of Antibiotics in Livestock After Activist Outcry

April 16, 2012

Activist Post

By Anthony Gucciardi

“Finally the FDA does something right. But instead of limiting the use of antibiotics, they should be banning it altogether.” –KTRN

After serious health campaigning led to a United States judge ordering the FDA to remove approval for antibiotic use on common animal feed products, the FDA is now limiting the usage of antibiotics among the food supply.

However, the FDA is not completely revoking approval for the antibiotics, only placing an order for farmers to stop using the drugs solely to help animals grow — what’s more, the farmers are given another 3 years before any real legal action goes into effect. The initial proposal was introduced back in 1977, and the FDA has stalled for decades to give a final answer.

That means that antibiotics used to ‘treat’ animal diseases, or even ‘prevent’ future diseases, will be perfectly fine under these guidelines.

The result may have to do with the livestock corporate juggernauts, who refused to admit that the mass drugging of animals with superbug-breeding antibiotics posed any real threat to the public.

Many consumer activists, such as Laura Rogers from the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, fear that these new guidelines are so broad that they mean virtually nothing.

‘If you were to ask me what’s the biggest gap, it’s that they’ve left way too much wiggle room [leeway] when it comes to preventative uses,’ said Rogers. ‘That’s going to have to be shored up [i.e., made more specific] in order for this action to be meaningful.’

Click here for the full report.

New Superbug Drugs Cause 500 Percent Increase In Infections

November 7, 2011

Natural News

by: Jonathan Benson

Governments around the world have been trying to work with the pharmaceutical industry to come up with (conventional) new ways to tackle the growing “superbug” problem. But an experimental new drug treatment regime touted as a potential solution for superbugs has been exposed as a complete failure, as those who receive it are five times more likely to develop serious infections than those who are treated the old way.

Professor David Neal from the University of Cambridge and his colleagues at the school’s Addenbrooke Hospital evaluated 709 prostate cancer patients who were undergoing diagnosis surgery for their conditions. One group received the typical ciprofloxacin drug treatment, while the other received an experimental combination of co-amoxiclav and gentamicin, which are two types of antibiotics.

Published in the British Journal of Urology, their study revealed that patients treated with co-amoxiclav and gentamicin have a 500 percent increased risk of developing serious infective complications compared to patients given the typical drug treatment.

While only 2.4 percent of the 454 patients in the ciprofloxacin group developed infections, nearly 13 percent of patients in the co-amoxiclav / gentamicin group ended up developing infections — and nearly five percent from the latter group ended up back in the hospital with severe cases of sepsis or septic shock.

“Any alteration to existing departmental antibiotic policies should be linked to strong clinical evidence,” commented Prof. Neal concerning the findings. “[S]uch changes may potentially result in significant ill health and potential harm, as well as the financial burden of treating new complications.”

Click here for the full report from Natural News.

Scientists Find First Superbug Strain of Gonorrhea

July 11, 2011

Reuters

Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in Japan that is resistant to all recommended antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.

The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease — called H041 — cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.

Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both “alarming” and “predictable.”

“Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it,” he said.

In a telephone interview Unemo, who will present details of the finding at a conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research (ISSTDR) in Quebec, Canada on Monday, said the fact that the strain had been found first in Japan also followed an alarming pattern.

Click here for the full report from Reuters.

 

Evidence Emerges That E.coli Superbug Was Created To Kill

July 6th, 2011

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.

This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the “mutation pressure” that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.

So if you’re curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.

The genetic code reveals the history

When scientists at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute decoded the genetic makeup of the O104 strain, they found it to be resistant to all the following classes and combinations of antibiotics:

• penicillins
• tetracycline
• nalidixic acid
• trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol
• cephalosporins
• amoxicillin / clavulanic acid
• piperacillin-sulbactam
• piperacillin-tazobactam

In addition, this O104 strain posses an ability to produce special enzymes that give it what might be called “bacteria superpowers” known technically as ESBLs:

“Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamases (ESBLs) are enzymes that can be produced by bacteria making them resistant to cephalosporins e.g. cefuroxime, cefotaxime and ceftazidime – which are the most widely used antibiotics in many hospitals,” explains the Health Protection Agency in the UK.

On top of that, this O104 strain possesses two genes — TEM-1 and CTX-M-15 — that “have been making doctors shudder since the 1990s,” reports The Guardian. And why do they make doctors shudder? Because they’re so deadly that many people infected with such bacteria experience critical organ failure and simply die.

Bioengineering a deadly superbug

So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that’s resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?

There’s really only one way this happens (and only one way) — you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn’t done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we’ve been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?

When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen “in the wild.” While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics — in combination — simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.

Engineered and then released into the wild

The evidence now points to this deadly strain of e.coli being engineered and then either being released into the food supply or somehow escaping from a lab and entering the food supply inadvertently. If you disagree with that conclusion — and you’re certainly welcome to — then you are forced to conclude that this octobiotic superbug (immune to eight classes of antibiotics) developed randomly on its own… and that conclusion is far scarier than the “bioengineered” explanation because it means octobiotic superbugs can simply appear anywhere at any time without cause. That would be quite an exotic theory indeed.

My conclusion actually makes more sense: This strain of e.coli was almost certainly engineered and then released into the food supply for a specific purpose. What would that purpose be? It’s obvious, I hope.

It’s all problem, reaction, solution at work here. First cause a PROBLEM (a deadly strain of e.coli in the food supply). Then wait for the public REACTION (huge outcry as the population is terrorized by e.coli). In response to that, enact your desired SOLUTION (total control over the global food supply and the outlawing of raw sprouts, raw milk and raw vegetables).

That’s what this is all about, of course. The FDA relied on the same phenomenon in the USA when pushing for its recent “Food Safety Modernization Act” which essentially outlaws small family organic farms unless they lick the boots of FDA regulators. The FDA was able to crush farm freedom in America by piggybacking on the widespread fear that followed e.coli outbreaks in the U.S. food supply. When people are afraid, remember, it’s not difficult to get them to agree to almost any level of regulatory tyranny. And making people afraid of their food is a simple matter… a few government press releases emailed to the mainstream media news affiliates is all it takes.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Study Finds Pillows Breeding Ground For Superbugs

June 22nd, 2011

FoxNews.com

By: NewsCore

Pillows at home and in hospitals have been overlooked as breeding grounds for infectious germs—including superbugs—according to a study cited by The London Times on Wednesday.

The study revealed that after two years of use, more than than one third of a pillow’s weight is made up of living and dead dust mites, dust mite feces, dead skin and bacteria.

The findings, from UK public healthcare provider Barts and the London NHS Trust, emerged after a probe into standard-issue hospital pillows found that they were potential vehicles for infections such as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff).

“People put a clean pillow case on and it looks and smells nice and fresh, but you are wrapping up something really nasty underneath,” said lead researcher, Dr. Art Tucker, principal clinical scientist at St. Barts Hospital. said Dr. Art Tucker, lead researcher and principal clinical scientist at St. Barts Hospital.

The study, presented at the Healthcare Associated Infections 2011 conference in London on Tuesday, compared the state of standard hospital pillows with a medical pillow developed by the company Gabriel Scientific during several months on different wards at the hospital.

The high-tech pillows, sold under the brand name SleepAngel, are made from a membrane that is normally used as a filter in a heart stent to keep out bacteria, and sealed by melting the edges together rather than sewn.

After two months the medical pillows tested negative for all bacteria under investigation, while the standard pillows tested positive for a range of micro-organisms.

The study stopped short of demonstrating that there was an increased risk of actual transmission of infections between hospital patients. Other scientists suggested that pillows were so widely used that they could not constitute a major health risk.

Click here for the full report from FoxNews.com

Forensic Evidence Emerges That European E.coli Superbug Was Bioengineered to Produce Human Fatalities

June 9th, 2011

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.

This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the “mutation pressure” that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.

So if you’re curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.

The genetic code reveals the history

When scientists at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute decoded the genetic makeup of the O104 strain, they found it to be resistant to all the following classes and combinations of antibiotics:

• penicillins
• tetracycline
• nalidixic acid
• trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol
• cephalosporins
• amoxicillin / clavulanic acid
• piperacillin-sulbactam
• piperacillin-tazobactam

In addition, this O104 strain posses an ability to produce special enzymes that give it what might be called “bacteria superpowers” known technically as ESBLs:

“Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamases (ESBLs) are enzymes that can be produced by bacteria making them resistant to cephalosporins e.g. cefuroxime, cefotaxime and ceftazidime – which are the most widely used antibiotics in many hospitals,” explains the Health Protection Agency in the UK.

On top of that, this O104 strain possesses two genes — TEM-1 and CTX-M-15 — that “have been making doctors shudder since the 1990s,” reports The Guardian. And why do they make doctors shudder? Because they’re so deadly that many people infected with such bacteria experience critical organ failure and simply die.

Bioengineering a deadly superbug

So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that’s resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?

There’s really only one way this happens (and only one way) — you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn’t done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we’ve been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?

When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen “in the wild.” While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics — in combination — simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.

Engineered and then released into the wild

The evidence now points to this deadly strain of e.coli being engineered and then either being released into the food supply or somehow escaping from a lab and entering the food supply inadvertently. If you disagree with that conclusion — and you’re certainly welcome to — then you are forced to conclude that this octobiotic superbug (immune to eight classes of antibiotics) developed randomly on its own… and that conclusion is far scarier than the “bioengineered” explanation because it means octobiotic superbugs can simply appear anywhere at any time without cause. That would be quite an exotic theory indeed.

My conclusion actually makes more sense: This strain of e.coli was almost certainly engineered and then released into the food supply for a specific purpose. What would that purpose be? It’s obvious, I hope.

It’s all problem, reaction, solution at work here. First cause a PROBLEM (a deadly strain of e.coli in the food supply). Then wait for the public REACTION (huge outcry as the population is terrorized by e.coli). In response to that, enact your desired SOLUTION (total control over the global food supply and the outlawing of raw sprouts, raw milk and raw vegetables).

That’s what this is all about, of course. The FDA relied on the same phenomenon in the USA when pushing for its recent “Food Safety Modernization Act” which essentially outlaws small family organic farms unless they lick the boots of FDA regulators. The FDA was able to crush farm freedom in America by piggybacking on the widespread fear that followed e.coli outbreaks in the U.S. food supply. When people are afraid, remember, it’s not difficult to get them to agree to almost any level of regulatory tyranny. And making people afraid of their food is a simple matter… a few government press releases emailed to the mainstream media news affiliates is all it takes.

First ban the natural medicine, then attack the food supply

Now, remember: All this is happening on the heels of the EU ban on medicinal herbs and nutritional supplements — a ban that blatantly outlaws nutritional therapies that help keep people healthy and free from disease. Now that all these herbs and supplements are outlawed, the next step is to make people afraid of fresh food, too. That’s because fresh vegetables are medicinal, and as long as the public has the right to buy fresh vegetables, they can always prevent disease.

But if you can make people AFRAID of fresh vegetables — or even outlaw them altogether — then you can force the entire population onto a diet of dead foods and processed foods that promote degenerative disease and bolster the profits of the powerful drug companies.

It’s all part of the same agenda, you see: Keep people sick, deny them access to healing herbs and supplements, then profit from their suffering at the hands of the global drug cartels.

GMOs play a similar role in all this, of course: They’re designed to contaminate the food supply with genetic code that causes widespread infertility among human beings. And those who are somehow able to reproduce after exposure to GMOs still suffer from degenerative disease that enriches the drug companies from “treatment.”

Do you recall which country was targeted in this recent e.coli scare? Spain. Why Spain? You may recall that leaked cables from Wikileaks revealed that Spain resisted the introduction of GMOs into its agricultural system, even as the U.S. government covertly threatened political retaliation for its resistance. This false blaming of Spain for the e.coli deaths is probably retaliation for Spain’s unwillingness to jump on the GMO bandwagon.

That’s the real story behind the economic devastation of Spain’s vegetable farmers. It’s one of the subplots being pursued alongside this e.coli superbug scheme.

Food as weapons of war – created by Big Pharma?

By the way, the most likely explanation of where this strain of e.coli was bioengineered is that the drug giants came up with it in their own labs. Who else has access to all the antibiotics and equipment needed to manage the targeted mutations of potentially thousands of e.coli colonies? The drug companies are uniquely positioned to both carry out this plot and profit from it. In other words, they have the means and the motive to engage in precisely such actions.

Aside from the drug companies, perhaps only the infectious disease regulators themselves have this kind of laboratory capacity. The CDC, for example, could probably pull this off if they really wanted to.

The proof that somebody bioengineered this e.coli strain is written right in the DNA of the bacteria. That’s forensic evidence, and what it reveals cannot be denied. This strain underwent repeated and prolonged exposure to eight different classes of antibiotics, and then it somehow managed to appear in the food supply. How do you get to that if not through a well-planned scheme carried out by rogue scientists? There is no such thing as “spontaneous mutation” into a strain that is resistant to the top eight classes of brand-name antibiotic drugs being sold by Big Pharma today. Such mutations have to be deliberate.

Once again, if you disagree with this assessment, then what you’re saying is that NO, it wasn’t done deliberately… it happened accidentally! And again, I’m saying that’s even scarier! Because that means the antibiotic contamination of our world is now at such an extreme level of overkill that a strain of e.coli in the wild can be saturated with eight different classes of antibiotics to the point where it naturally develops into its own deadly superbug. If that’s what people believe, then that’s almost a scarier theory than the bioengineering explanation!

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Drug-Resistant Superbugs Found in 3 States

September 14, 2010

AOL Health

An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: Bacteria that have been made resistant to nearly all antibiotics by an alarming new gene have sickened people in three states and are popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday.

The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.

How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.

Scientists have long feared this – a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance, creating dangerous “superbugs.”

“It’s a great concern,” because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “It’s just a matter of time” until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person, he said.

Grayson heads an American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.

The U.S. cases occurred this year in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois, said Brandi Limbago, a lab chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.

“We want physicians to look for it,” especially in patients who have traveled recently to India or Pakistan, she said.

What can people do?

Don’t add to the drug resistance problem, experts say. Don’t pressure your doctors for antibiotics if they say they aren’t needed, use the ones you are given properly, and try to avoid infections by washing your hands.

The gene is carried by bacteria that can spread hand-to-mouth, which makes good hygiene very important.

It’s also why health officials are so concerned about where the threat is coming from, said Dr. Patrice Nordmann, a microbiology professor at South-Paris Medical School. India is an overpopulated country that overuses antibiotics and has widespread diarrheal disease and many people without clean water.

“The ingredients are there” for widespread transmission, he said. “It’s going to spread by plane all over the world.”

The U.S. patients were not related. The California woman needed hospital care after being in a car accident in India. The Illinois man had pre-existing medical problems and a urinary catheter, and is thought to have contracted an infection with the gene while traveling in India. The case from Massachusetts involved a woman from India who had surgery and chemotherapy for cancer there and then traveled to the U.S.

Lab tests showed their germs were not killed by the types of drugs normally used to treat drug-resistant infections, including “the last-resort class of antibiotics that physicians go to,” Limbago said.

She did not know how the three patients were treated, but all survived.

Doctors have tried treating some of these cases with combinations of antibiotics, hoping that will be more effective than individual ones are. Some have resorted to using polymyxins – antibiotics used in the 1950s and ’60s that were unpopular because they can harm the kidneys.

The two Canadian cases were treated with a combination of antibiotics, said Dr. Johann Pitout of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. One case was in Alberta, the other in British Columbia.

Both patients had medical emergencies while traveling in India. They developed urinary infections that were discovered to have the resistance gene once they returned home to Canada, Pitout said.

The CDC advises any hospitals that find such cases to put the patient in medical isolation, check the patient’s close contacts for possible infection, and look for more infections in the hospital.

Any case “should raise an alarm,” Limbago said.

Click here for the full report

New Superbug Gene Could Spread Widely

August 12, 2010

Associated Press

British scientists have found a new gene that allows any bacteria to become a superbug, and are warning that it is widespread in India and could soon appear worldwide.

The gene, which can be swapped between different bacteria to make them resistant to most drugs, has so far been identified in 37 people who returned to the U.K. after undergoing surgery in India or Pakistan.

The resistant gene has also been detected in Australia, Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands and Sweden. The researchers say since many Americans and Europeans travel to India and Pakistan for elective procedures like cosmetic surgery, it was likely the superbug gene would spread worldwide.

In an article published online Wednesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, doctors reported finding a new gene, called NDM-1. The gene alters bacteria, making them resistant to nearly all known antibiotics. It has been seen largely in E. coli bacteria, the most common cause of urinary tract infections, and on DNA structures that can be easily copied and passed onto other types of bacteria.

The researchers said the superbug gene appeared to be already circulating widely in India, where the health system is much less likely to identify its presence or have adequate antibiotics to treat patients.

“The potential of NDM-1 to be a worldwide public health problem is great, and coordinated international surveillance is needed,” the authors wrote.

Still, the numbers of people who have been identified with the superbug gene remains very small.

“We are potentially at the beginning of another wave of antibiotic resistance, though we still have the power to stop it,” said Christopher Thomas, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Birmingham who was not linked to the study. Thomas said better surveillance and infection control procedures might halt the gene’s spread.

Thomas said while people checking into British hospitals were unlikely to encounter the superbug gene, they should remain vigilant about standard hygiene measures like properly washing their hands.

“The spread of these multi-resistant bacteria merits very close monitoring,” wrote Johann Pitout of the division of microbiology at the University of Calgary, Canada, in an accompanying Lancet commentary.

Pitout called for international surveillance of the bacteria, particularly in countries that actively promote medical tourism.
“The consequences will be serious if family doctors have to treat infections caused by these multi-resistant bacteria on a daily basis,” he wrote.

Click here for the full report

Gonorrhea Becoming Drug-Resistant “Superbug”

March 30, 2010

Reuters

By: Kate Kelland

The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant “superbug” if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it, a leading sexual health expert said.

Catherine Ison, a specialist on gonorrhea from Britain’s Health Protection Agency said a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Manila next week would be vital to efforts to try to stop the bug repeatedly adapting to and overcoming drugs.

“This is a very clever bacteria. If this problem isn’t addressed, there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat,” she said in a telephone interview.

Gonorrhea is a common bacterial sexually-transmitted infection and if left untreated can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women.

Globally, the WHO estimates that there are at least 340 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections — including syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis — every year among people aged 15 to 49.

Ison said the highest incidences of gonorrhea were in south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but as yet the WHO has no breakdown by individual infection type.

Current treatment for gonorrhea in most countries consists of a single antibiotic dose of either cefixime or ceftriaxone.

But Ison, who is due to speak on the issue at a Society for General Microbiology conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday, said strains of the Neisseria gonorrhea bacteria were starting to become resistant and could soon become impervious to all current antibiotic treatment options.

“Ceftriaxone and cefixime are still very effective but there are signs that resistance, particularly to cefixime is emerging and soon these drugs may not be a good choice,” she said.

Instances of gonorrhea being resistant to multiple drugs — the definition of a “superbug” — have started to appear in Japan, where health authorities had decided to up the dose to treat the disease, but stick with the same antibiotic, she said.

Other reports of rising gonorrhea drug resistance had also come from Hong Kong, China, Australia and parts of Asia.

Ison said the best way to try to reduce the risk now — beyond encouraging the use of condoms which halt the spread of sexually transmitted diseases — would be to treat gonorrhea with two different antibiotics at the same time.

This is a technique used in the treatment of some other diseases like tuberculosis and one that makes it more difficult for the bacteria to learn how to conquer the drugs.

“There are few new drugs available. So using more than one at the same time is probably what should happen in the first instance,” said Ison. “We also need to set up good lines of communication between countries so that we can all talk to each other about what’s happening in gonorrhea and make sure we change treatment strategies when we need to.”

A WHO spokeswoman said its experts would discuss drug-resistant gonorrhea at a meeting in the Philippine capital Manila next week.

Click here for the full report.

Researchers Find Superbug at Public Beaches

January 14, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Public beaches may provide a home for and mechanism for the spread of the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and presented to the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

“Our results suggest that public beaches may be a reservoir for possible transmission of MRSA,” lead researcher Marilyn Roberts said.

MRSA is a drug-resistant form to the common Staph infection that can lead to severe and even lethal side effects if left untreated. Once a problem largely confined to hospitals, MRSA has spread beyond health care settings in recent years. This new prevalence, combined with its evolved ability to infect healthier people, has led to a situation where MRSA now kills more people in the United States each year than AIDS.

Researchers tested 10 public beaches on the Puget Sound and identified 13 different varieties of Staph bacteria spread over nine of them. Seven of these varieties were multidrug resistant. Five of the MRSA samples appeared most similar to hospital varieties, suggesting that some form of contamination was responsible for their presence.

People may be infected with Staph bacteria without developing symptoms. These carriers can in turn infect others. Carriers may have been responsible for the two MRSA varieties that did not appear to come from hospitals, but the researchers could not be sure.

Roberts said that the MRSA probably entered the beaches due to environmental contamination.

“Where all of these organisms are coming from and how they’re getting seeded (on the beaches) is not clear,” she said. Two beaches tested in southern California were not contaminated.

Nevertheless, the method of sampling that Roberts and colleagues used is not likely to capture every different Staph variety at a given beach.

“The fact that we found these organisms suggests that the amount is much higher than we previously thought,” she said.

Click here for the full report

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