Antibiotic resistance
tsmith | January 1, 2014Guest post by Tim Fothergill, Ph.D.
In January of this year the British Chief Medical Officer urged her government to add threat posed by superbugs to the official list of "Apocalypses to Worry About" along with catastrophic terrorist attacks and massive flooding. With typical British understatement, its actual name is the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies but a very stark picture was painted of a post-antibiotic world in which routine operations, such as hip replacements, could prove fatal. In September, The Centers for Disease Control in the US issued a similar statement which…
kkrisberg | July 12, 2013In a recent study comparing workers at industrial livestock operations and those employed at antibiotic-free livestock operations, researchers found that industrial workers were much more likely to carry livestock-associated strains of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly and scarily known as MRSA.
First, it's important to note that both groups of workers had a similar prevalence of S. aureus and methicillin-resistant S. Aureus (MRSA); however, it was overwhelmingly workers at industrial livestock operations, sometimes known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs,…
tsmith | February 26, 2013Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…
jhalper | July 17, 2012We were just getting used to the idea of our digestive tract as an ecosystem. There are 10 times as many bacteria in our gut as there are cells in our bodies, and the ecological balance between the different types might affect everything from our tendency to gain weight to our general health and susceptibility to various diseases.
Now, a Weizmann Institute researcher has exposed a whole new layer of this ecosystem: the viruses – called phages – that infect our gut bacteria.
Dr. Rotem Sorek and his team identified hundreds of these phages in the human gut. They were able to find them thanks to…
lborkowski | April 13, 2012Yesterday, the FDA announced a new program that has the potential to slash the routine use of antibiotics by livestock producers. The routine administration of antibiotics to livestock with no signs of sickness helps animals grow more quickly, but it's also a significant contributor to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An estimated 70% of the antibiotics sold in the US are given to non-human animals, and most of them are the same drugs that humans rely on to treat our illnesses.
Gardiner Harris's New York Times article about FDA's announcement bears the exciting (to me, anyway)…
tsmith | April 5, 2012The ecology of antibiotic resistance on farms is complicated. Animals receive antibiotic doses in their food and water, for reasons of growth promotion, disease prophylaxis, and treatment. Other chemicals in the environment, such as cleaning products or antimicrobial metals in the feed, may also act as drivers of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic-resistant organisms may also be present in the environment already, from the air, soil, or manure pits within or near the barns. Ecologically, it's a mess and makes it more difficult to attribute the evolution and spread of resistance to one…
tsmith | March 7, 2012I mentioned last month that we are planning an Emerging Diseases conference here in April. Things are moving quickly and registration is now open (here). Abstract submission is also up and running here.
The details:
Oral and poster presentation research abstracts are due by 5:00pm on March 23, 2012. Individuals may submit up to two research abstracts. Abstracts must not exceed 250 words in length. There are a limited number of spots available for those interested in providing a 15-minute oral presentation. Abstracts submitted for oral presentations that are not selected for a talk will…
tsmith | February 21, 2012I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our "extended microbiome" shows that we share not only with each other, but also with a large number of other species. We certainly do this with my particular organism of interest, Staphylococcus aureus. There are many reports in the literature showing where humans have apparently spread their strains of S. aureus to their pets (dogs, cats,…
tsmith | January 19, 2012Back in November, I blogged about one of our studies, examining methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Iowa meat products. In that post, I mentioned that it was one of two studies we'd finished on the subject. Well, today the second study is out in PLoS ONE (freely available to all). In this study, we focused only on pork products, and included 395 samples from Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. We also looked at not only conventional meats, but also "alternative" meat products. Most of the latter were products labeled "raised without antibiotics" or "raised without antibiotic…
tsmith | November 9, 2011I've blogged previously on a few U.S. studies which investigated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in raw meat products (including chicken, beef, turkey, and pork). This isn't just a casual observation as one who eats food--I follow this area closely as we also have done our own pair of food sampling investigations here in Iowa, and will be doing a much larger, USDA-funded investigation of the issue over the next 5 years.
Let me sum up where the field currently stands. There have been a number of studies looking at S. aureus on raw meat products, carried out both here in North…
tsmith | August 11, 2011Over at White Coat Underground, Pal has the post that I've been meaning to write. Earlier this summer, a family member posted on Facebook that a friend of her daughter was nursing a "nasty spider bite" that she got while camping in Michigan. Her post claimed it was a Brown Recluse bite. Being my usually buttinski self, I posted and told her that it was really, really unlikely to be a brown recluse bite, and that the friend-of-the-daughter-of-the-relative should hie thee to her physician and get the "bite" checked out. I told her that rather than a spider bite, it could be a Staph infection…
lborkowski | August 4, 2011A strain of salmonella, Salmonella Heidelberg, has sickened at least 77 people in 26 states and killed one in California. The outbreak has been linked to ground turkey produced at an Arkansas plant, and Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation has announced a recall of about 36 million pounds of the meat. The meat is sold under the Honeysuckle brand and bear the establishment number P-963 inside the USDA inspection mark. USDA has a list of affected products on its website.
This strain of salmonella is resistant to several commonly prescribed antibiotics. As William Neuman notes in the New York…
tsmith | June 17, 2011As I mentioned previously, I'm heading up organization of this conference, which will take place September 8-11 in Washington, DC. The abstract submission deadline has just been extended another week until next Friday, the 24th, so there's still time to send in an abstract. Hope to see many of you in September!
tsmith | May 12, 2011An ahead-of-print paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases is generating some buzz in the mainstream media. While the findings are interesting, I'm honestly not sure how they got published, being so preliminary.
Like many areas, Vancouver, British Columbia has seen a jump in the prevalence of bedbugs. After finding impoverished patients infested with the bugs, researchers decided to collect some and test them for pathogens--specifically, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE). So, they tested 5 bugs from 3 patients. That's it--it doesn't…
tsmith | April 19, 2011As Maryn McKenna and others have reported, a paper was released on Friday showing a high percentage of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus contaminating raw, retail-available meat products. There has been a lot of media coverage of this finding--so what does the study say, and what are its implications? More after the jump.
First, a bit about S. aureus itself, and why this study was carried out. Historically, Staph has been a relatively common cause of food poisoning. The bacterium produces toxins that can collect to a high level when prepared foods are left at room temperature, such as…
tsmith | March 29, 2011One of the reasons I've not been blogging as much over the past 2 years or so is that it's been just insane in the lab. As I was still living off start-up funds and pilot grants, I didn't have anyone full-time to take care of everything, so all the work has been done by myself and a handful of excellent graduate & undergrad students. Happily, some of the initial projects are wrapping up, and publications are starting to come out (I'll be blogging about others in the coming days/weeks). One of them was published yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases: Livestock-associated…
lborkowski | May 18, 2010For several years, health professionals have been concerned about the rise in infections from methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - a bacteria that's resistant to several of the antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. CDC estimates that in 2005, there were more than 94,000 MRSA infections in the US, and more than 18,000 of those patients died. The numbers are probably much higher now.
A study just published in the journal Pediatrics gives us new information about staph infections in hospitalized US children and how they're being treated. The results show a…
mikethemadbiologist | February 18, 2010And you thought fixing the renminbi was bad. By way of Glyn Moody, we find that The Guardian has a very disturbing report about antibiotic resistance in China (italics mine):
Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country's farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain.
Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly…
tsmith | January 23, 2009 A little over a year ago I put a post up documenting research out of Canada which found methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Canadian pigs. This had also been seen in Europe (with a lot of research coming out of the Netherlands). What I didn't note at the time was that we were gearing up to start some sampling of our own on area swine farms. Some of you saw that we presented the results of that research last year at ICEID and ASM; now the paper is out describing our pilot project in PLoS ONE. (Note: the paper was available earlier, but now they seem to have removed it…
tsmith | June 28, 2008 Balance is a tricky thing to find in area, and medicine is notorious for its trade-offs. A drug that may make you well in the long run may also have side effects that make taking the medicine difficult. Even drugs that we often think of as typically innocuous, such as antibiotics, can have an enormous cost associated with their use, both at the individual and the population level. Sachs covers our love-hate relationship with antibiotics and germs in general in her book, Good Germs, Bad Germs. More after the jump...
Sachs opens her book with a dramatic example of the cost of our "war"…