antibiotics

One 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…
I have to admit that creationists are a creative bunch, if not accurate. From the files of the Mad Biologist comes this post about a creationist explanation of antibiotic resistance. It's pretty remarkable. And I hope nobody tells the Coultergeist about this argument... (originally published April 18, 2005). Google is an amazing thing (so is Gizoogle). I typed in "evangelical" and "antibiotic" and found a "creationist explanation" of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. What strikes me is the selective use of facts to support a preconceived notion. While creationists do…
The FDA just halted clinical trials for using the antibiotic Ketek (telithromycin-a macrolide antibiotic) to treat ear infections and tonsilitis in children because it can cause liver failure, blurred vision and loss of consciousness in adults. Some FDA officials have urged withdrawing Ketek entirely because the danger to patients. Unfortunately, we might need Ketec to treat certain multidrug resistant infections. I would urge that Ketec not be banned (but labelled like hell) so that it can be used as a drug of last resort, in the same way colistin is (which can cause kidney damage).
Revere has a very good historical roundup of the 'uninevitability' of a national or universal healthcare system. One consequence of our fragmented, patchwork healthcare system is antibiotic resistant bacteria. Just to give you an example of how bad the antibiotic resistance problem is, in most hospitals, anywhere from 20-70% of Staphylococcus aureus infections are methicillin resistant ("MRSA"). In long-term care facilities, around 90% of S. aureus infections are MRSA. MRSA infections are quite serious. Not only are they harder to treat (due to treatment failure from using the wrong…
A recent article in Applied and Environmental Microbiology illustrates the effect that conventional farming, which uses a lot of antibiotics, has on the evolution of antibiotic resistance. The authors examined the difference in the frequency of resistance to antibiotics in the human pathogen Campylobacter. Resistance in bacteria from conventional raised poultry (actually, the carcasses) was much higher than in organic, non-antibiotic intensive farming: for floroquinolones, which are commonly used in medicine (e.g., ciprofloxacin), less than two percent of isolates were resistant, compared…