Acinetobacter
mmckenna | June 17, 2010A set of papers published this month in two journals provide an unsettling glimpse into the rocketing incidence and complex epidemiology of one really scary pathogen, Acinetobacter baumanii.
In the all-star annuals of resistant bugs, A. baumanii is an underappreciated player. If people -- other than, you know, disease geeks -- recognize it, that is because it's become known in the past few years for its propensity to attack wounded veterans shipped to military hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan, earning it the nickname "Iraqibacter." (Important note: Steve Silberman of Wired magazine took an…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2007I've blogged before about how, for children under five, it's not the 'sexy' microbes that kill, but instead, the run of the mill ones: the bacteria that cause diarrhea and pneumonia are the culprits. One of the things I have heard a lot of recently regarding antibiotic development (and related therapies) is that we need to focus on 'non-paradigm' and non-model organisms. There's a problem with that approach:
The non-standard microbes aren't the ones causing the bulk of bacterial disease.
Oh dear.
In roaming around the International Society for Microbial Resistance website, I came across…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2007Update: I was in error (long day at work). The article was published in Wired magazine
Seed Magazine, the meatworld Overlords of ScienceBlogs, has an article about Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium which can be resistant to virtually every antibiotic used to treat it--and in some cases, all antibiotics.
It's pretty good, although I think A. baumanii is less of a problem than MRSA, for example. It's also never been clear to me why the strains that circulate in hospitals are resistant to fewer drugs than those recovered from environmental trauma wounds (e.g., wounded soldiers). Anyway, I…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2006Joseph beat me to it: there's a Nature article about platensimycin, an antibiotic that inhibits lipid biosynthesis in Gram positive bacteria. While it's not in human trials yet, it's always good to have another antibiotic that's effective against MRSA and VRE. Now, if it only worked against Acinetobacter...
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2006From the archives, comes this post about the health crisis no one cares about (except for the Mad Biologist. We are very caring): the 90,000 deaths per year from infections people get while in the hospital. And this number is probably an underestimate.
Bacterial infections aren't sexy: no one walks, bikes, hops, pogo sticks for the cure. There are no ribbons, no bumper stickers, and no hot celebrities (damn!). Yet, according to the CDC, bacterial infections acquired in hospitals kill at least 90,000 people per year in the U.S. Granted some of those who died would have died from something…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2006One of my many pet peeves is that nobody takes 'ordinary' bacterial infections seriously. I originally wrote this post Jan. 8, 2006, but I was ranting about Acinetobacter since the previous August. The good news is that people other than infectious disease specialists are worrying about it. The bad news is that the Infectious Disease Society of America states that there's no antibiotic in the pipeline to treat multidrug resistant Acinetobacter.
One of the talks I heard at the ICAAC meeting was about the emerging pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii (given by Yehuda Carmeli). Israel is having…