antibiotics

More scary food news from China: Chinese catfish have been found to contain fluoroquinolone residues. Fluoroquinolones are medically important antibiotics and include ciprofloxacin ("Cipro") and enrofloxacin (which has been banned from agricultural use in the U.S.). Not only can fluoroquinolones be toxic and cause allergic reactions, but this means that China is probably still misusing these vital antibiotics. From the Clarion Ledger (italics mine): Catfish contamination at some Mississippi grocery stores could indicate a much larger problem with the safety of imported foods, state…
No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now. Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae*, but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool microbiologists use (I'll refer to the carbapenemase gene as the 'KPC gene'). KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high. The KPC gene confers resistance to all cephalosporins and Ã-lactam antibiotics: basically,…
He's a Snuffleupagus, not a Seamus ...do we have to name everything Seamus? Yesterday, the Boston Globe had an interesting story about curing a sick tapir at the Franklin Park Zoo using antibiotics: With its trunk leading the way, the baby Baird's tapir once again explored pools and exotic plants at the Franklin Park Zoo yesterday after recovering from life-threatening pneumonia. The 50-pound South American mammal, which looks like a cross between an elephant and a hog, responded to an aggressive eight-day regimen of antibiotics, said Dr. Eric Baitchman, a zoo veterinarian. Zoo trainers plan…
While washing your hands for 15-20 seconds with soap and water is the best way to prevent the transmission of infectious disease through hand to hand contact, in a pinch, alcohol santizers work well. Good news from Australia: you can use sanitizers and drive. From Microbe: Young health care workers cite many reasons why they don't use appropriate hand hygiene at work. One concern, particularly among some young health care workers who are required to have a zero serum alcohol level to legally drive automobiles while on a probationary license in Australia and some other countries, is the…
One of the things that has been revealed by the VA Tech shooting is that the government keeps a database of prescription drug users. This has bothered some. Glenn Greenwald writes (italics mine): Let me ask you this question: let's say I come into your office (I'm a mentally competent adult -- at least in our hypothetical) and tell you that I want to take a Schedule II drug (or Schedule III) for Medical Problem X (or even just garden-variety insomnia, depression, or anxiety). You tell me that I shouldn't, that there is a high risk of addiction, that the problem doesn't warrant that…
I've mentioned the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) before. Today, I'll be attending the NARMS public hearing which is going to discuss four questions: 1) Why, on this night 1) Are there inherent biases in the sampling strategies employed in NARMS? If so, how can they be improved to ensure that the data and interpretation are scientifically sound given current resources? 2) Are there epidemiological and/or microbiological research studies that would better serve the goals of NARMS and the regulatory work of FDA? 3) Are current plans for data harmonization and…
I've just finished reading Chris Mooney's and Matt Nisbet's Science article about communicating science to the general public. It's right on target. When it comes to defending evolutionary biology, the success one will have is far less dependent on marshalling the appropriate facts than many scientists would like. Since the Scopes trial 80 years ago, the evidence in favor of evolution has only increased--one discpline that supports it, genetics, was in its infancy, and another, molecular evolution/population genetics, didn't even exist. Yet we don't really seem to have made a dent, if…
A huge number of antibiotic prescriptions are filled due to the misdiagnosis of sore throats. Here's something from the archives about this problem while I'm away. A long-standing complaint by many microbiologists has been the mistreatment of sore throats in children. Antibiotics are often prescribed even though they are usually ineffective (italics mine): Most children with sore throats are given antibiotics when they see their doctors, even though a large majority of the ailments are caused by organisms that do not respond to the drugs, a new study has found. The only common cause of…
From the archives comes this post about the effect antibiotic resistance could have during an influenza outbreak. I recently corresponded with someone in a position to make public health policy who wanted to know what effect antibiotic resistance would have on avian influenza (this makes me think of Kristof's recent column). Since I regularly encounter similar questions, I thought it worthwhile to share this (I've removed other parts that aren't relevant to the matter). Also, on occasion, I like to demonstrate that the Mad Biologist isn't always Mad...: Anti-viral resistance. While…
One of the few predictable statistics in American public health is that between 35,000-40,000 people will die every year from 'ordinary' influenza. Most of these deaths are preventable. Yet we do nothing. In the U.S., influenza kills approximately the same number of people every year as breast cancer does. But unlike breast cancer, we don't need to run, walk, jump, pogostick, or unicycle for the 'cure.' All we need to do is vaccinate enough of the appropriate people. It's that simple. An effective influenza vaccination policy would involve the mass vaccination of those most likely to…
There's an interesting news story about antibiotic resistance in wild chimpanzee populations that claims to have found transfer of resistant Escherichia coli from humans to wild animals. According to the article: To do the study, the UI researchers, working with colleagues from Makerere University in Uganda and McGill University in Canada , examined 2 of the communities of chimpanzees living in the Kibale park. One of them has been under study by scientists for more than 2 decades. The other is visited regularly by ranger guides who shepherd tourists in the park. The researchers collected…
To prevent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that statements by Michael Egnor be read using approved devices such as the StupidView9000 Orac bravely dives deeper into the Discovery Institute's creationist drivel, and reports on the continuing ignorant idiocy of Michael Egnor. I don't know what's worse: Egnor's willful ignorance, or his pseudo-victimization complex. Let's deal with the ignorance first. In an interview with Casey Luskin, Egnor states (italics mine): EGNOR: Well, it's a pretty funny claim on the part of Darwinists. It's sort of like Al Gore claiming that he…
Who would ever think that 'wastewater lagoons'--lakes full of animal shit--could be so interesting? And important in understanding how agricultural antibiotic use increases the frequency of antibiotic resistance genes. A recent study looked at the abundance of tetracycline resistance genes in eight lagoons that stored cattle waste. Two of the lagoons were used with cattle that were never exposed to tetracycline. Two were 'mixed use', and four high use, where the cattle have been exposed to tetracycline (an aside: the lagoon from which the waste is used as fertilizer is a high use lagoon.…
Last night, I was reading some of the comments you leave here, and, in response to a post about a surgeon who thinks evolution is irrelevant to medical practice (Got Antibiotic Resistance?), fellow ScienceBlogling Mark left a comment. I'll get to the comment in a minute, but tragically, I hear stories like his far too often. Mark writes (italics original): Mike, you've nailed exactly what pisses me off so much about Egnor. Right now, we're talking about something that's become deeply personal to me. Since January, my father has been paralyzed from the waist down. The cause of it is MRSA. He…
Blogging from the NW ASM branch meeting, part II Yesterday, I wrote about the some of present (and future) methods that are (or will be) used in clinical labs to identify pathogenic microbes. In these next two posts, I want to describe the talks I attended on antibiotic resistance, from Xuan Qin and Fred Tenover (CDC), and some new things that I learned. How do bacteria survive when their human hosts take a lot of antibiotics? Children's Hospital (Seattle) routinely sees about 200 children with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that only appears when you have two copies…
I haven't been able to respond to Michael Egnor's idiocy about evolution because I've been recovering from a meeting, but fortunately my fellow ScienceBloglings have. But I'll add my two cents anyway. Here's the really stupid part from Egnor (italics mine): Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools. The evolution--not the…
One of the little things I liked about Rick Weiss' cefquinome article was a diagram about how antibiotic resistant strains evolve. One of the confusing things about the evolution of resistance (and natural selection, for that matter) is the notion that the evolution of resistance happens among individuals within populations. This graphic from the Washington Post lays that out quite nicely: It might be good for students too.
There's something very interesting about the unfolding story of the possible FDA cefquinome approval (I've covered it here). After doing a Technorati search, virtually all of the blogs that discuss this issue are either non-partisan or progressive/liberal (I say 'virtually' because I might have missed one, but I actually didn't see any). The rightwing bloggysphere is nowhere to be found. Any thoughts on why that might be? Maybe they are just slow off the mark on this one? Infections don't check political affiliation....
Or maybe terrifying is a better word. I just returned from the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, where I learned some very interesting things about S. aureus (since I'm going to refer to MRSA, methicillin resistant S. aureus repeatedly, go check this link if you want to know more about MRSA): 1) 43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result of one strain of MRSA. Not 43% of staphylococcal infections. All skin infections. 2) According to the NHANES study, the number of people who carry S. aureus asymptomatically (in other words, it lives up your…
...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple. Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…