08/30/2010 Superbugs linked to premature baby deaths

08/06/2010 Arsenal of antibiotics not being restocked

07/30/2010 Drug-resistant strain of E. coli emerges in U.S.

07/07/2010 ESBL: A greater danger than MRSA?
"In hospitals, MRSA is considered Public Enemy Nr 1, and the increase in nosocomial infections, worldwide, has drawn universal attention to this ‘superbug’. However, Staphylococcus aureus is not alone - other pathogens are proving their resistance to antibiotics..."
Karoline Laarmann
European Hospital
July 7, 2010
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05/18/2010 Study Finds Surge in Kids Hospitalized With MRSA
"The number of children hospitalized with dangerous drug-resistant staph infections surged 10-fold in recent years, a study found."
Wall Street Journal
May 18, 2010
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05/17/2010 Health Blog Q&A: ‘Superbug’ Author on Protecting Your Kid from MRSA
"We wanted to learn more about how kids acquire MRSA, not in the hospital but in the course of everyday life — which was the situation for most of the cases in the report. So we turned to Maryn McKenna, author of “Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA,” for the scoop."
Katherine Hobson
Wall Street Journal - Health Blog
May 17, 2010
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04/29/2010 Klebsiella highlighted in television series Grey's Anatomy

Significance of Klebsiella prevalence highlighted in a recent episode of the television series Grey's Anatomy:
"Unfortunately, Klebsiella organisms have an increasing resistance to multiple antibiotics..."
Greys Anatomy, Episode #122
April 29, 2010
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03/29/2010 Sex infection gonorrhea risks becoming "superbug"
"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."
Kate Kelland
Reuters.com
March 29, 2010
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03/12/2010 Infectious disease organization pushing for 10 new antibiotics by 2020
"The Infectious Diseases Society of America (ISDA) is one organization looking at solving this public health dilemma. They are looking at the development of an antibiotic pipeline by bringing together industry, scientific and policy communities, among others, to develop 10 new antibiotics by the year 2020."
Robert Herriman
Examiner.com
March 12, 2010
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03/06/2010 The Spread of Superbugs
"But now we’re seeing increasing numbers of superbugs that survive antibiotics. One of the best-known — MRSA, a kind of staph infection — kills about 18,000 Americans annually."
Nichalas D. Kristof
New York Times
March 6, 2010
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02/26/2010 Rising Threat of Infections Unfazed by Antibiotics
"...for a combination of business reasons and scientific challenges, the pharmaceuticals industry is pursuing very few drugs for Acinetobacter and other organisms of its type, known as Gram-negative bacteria. Meanwhile, the germs are evolving and becoming ever more immune to existing antibiotics."
Andrew Pollack
New York Times
February 26, 2010
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02/26/2010 Deadly Germs Largely Ignored By Drug Firms
"It is likely to be several years before new drugs to treat Gram-negative infections are available. A report last September by European health authorities found only six novel drugs in clinical trials that might work against at least one Gram-negative organism, compared with 13 for Gram-positive bacteria."
Andrew Pollack
New York Times
February 26, 2010
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10/30/2009 1960s-Era Antibiotics Show First Signs of Failing in Some Infections
"Little-known drugs dating from the 1960s that have proved useful against stubborn bacterial infections are showing the first signs of falling prey to bacterial resistance, a study presented October 30 at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America shows."
Nathan Seppa
US News and World Report
October 30, 2009
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10/16/2009 Antibiotic resistance: Why Big Pharma can't combat our second-worst killer
"'Antibiotic resistance is an international pandemic that compromises the treatment of all infectious diseases,' says a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology. 'Resistance essentially is uncontrollable.'"
Melly Alazraki
AOL Daily Finance
October 16, 2009
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10/15/2009 How Much Do Antibiotic-Resistant Infections Cost?
"What’s the real economic impact of antibiotic overuse and antibiotic-resistant infections?  At one Chicago hospital, the hard-to-treat bugs added $18,588 to $29,069 per infected patient, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease."
Laura Landro
The Wall Street Journal
October 15, 2009
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10/01/2009 The Desperate Need for New Antibiotics
"In recent years, efforts to combat drug-resistant bacteria have focused on the immediate goal of reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections. But now global health officials face an approaching crisis: the number of different antibiotics available to treat such infections when they do occur is dwindling because pharmaceutical companies have neglected to invest in the development of new types of drugs."
Eben Harrell / London
Time Magazine
October 1, 2009
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08/13/2009 Don't Forget the Bacterial Threat
"Antibiotic resistance is a much bigger problem than swine flu.  ...  Unfortunately, the era of easily treated infections is proving to be short-lived, as bacteria develop increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of resistance to antibiotics."
Mitchell J. Schwaber and Yehuda Carmeli
The Wall Street Journal
August 12, 2009
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07/07/2009 How to combat the latest supergerms
"Health experts are beginning to recognize that places like locker rooms, gyms and other public sports and recreation facilities -- even schools -- can also harbor MRSA and similar disease-causing organisms."
Ginny Graves
CNNhealth.com
July 7, 2009
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06/02/2009 Locker Room Infections a Growing Threat
"Health experts are beginning to recognize that places like locker rooms, gyms and other public sports and recreation facilities -- even schools -- can also harbor MRSA and similar disease-causing organisms."
Marketwire
June 2, 2009
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03/18/2009 Miami Hospital Cleaning Neonatal Unit After Finding Drug Resistant Bacteria
"Miami Children's Hospital is cleaning its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit after two babies died there of a deadly, drug-resistant bacteria."
Linda Young
AHN
March 18, 2009
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03/03/2009 2 Chicago hospital patients with bacterial infections die
"Officials learned Feb. 23 that four patients in the hospital's ICU were infected with acinetobacter—bacteria that can be found in soil and water and on people's skin, the hospital said in a statement. Before the outbreak was contained, seven of the ward's 10 patients were infected."
Deborah L. Shelton and Andrew L. Wang
Chicago Tribune
March 3, 2009
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02/20/2009 Gram-negative bacteria are drug-resistant superbugs to watch out for
"A new crop of drug-resistant superbugs is in our midst, and experts believe that they could rival the deadly superbug MRSA."
CNN.com
February 20, 2009
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01/22/2009 Model loses hand, feet to infection
"Bridi was diagnosed with a infection by the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium, which can often prove fatal."
The Australian
January 22, 2009
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01/19/2009 MRSA Infections Double in Children’s Ears, Noses and Sinuses
"The rate of infections resistant to antibiotics more than doubled in children’s ears, nose and throats over a six-year period, prompting cautions that the overuse of drugs has limited doctors’ weapons to fight the germs."
Nicole Ostrow
Bloomberg
January 19, 2009
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12/31/2008 Antibiotics before infections save lives: study
"Giving antibiotics to patients in intensive care units as a precaution saves lives, according to a major Dutch study published Wednesday.  The findings in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest the benefits of administering antibiotics right away, even before an infection develops, outweigh the risks people will develop resistance to them, the researchers said."
Michael Kahn
Reuters
December 31, 2008
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12/07/2008 A Deadly Bug Invades Our Towns
"According to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, MRSA caused more than 94,000 life-threatening infections and nearly 19,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005. One study in The New England Journal of Medicine found MRSA 59% of the time when adults came to emergency rooms with skin infections."
Dr. Ranit Mishori
Parade Magazine
December 7, 2008
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11/26/2008 Bad Bugs, No Drugs: No ESKAPE! An Update from the Infectious Diseases Society of America
"The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) continues to view with concern the lean pipeline for novel therapeutics to treat drug-resistant infections, especially those caused by gram-negative pathogens. Infections now occur that are resistant to all current antibacterial options. Although the IDSA is encouraged by the prospect of success for some agents currently in preclinical development, there is an urgent, immediate need for new agents with activity against these panresistant organisms. There is no evidence that this need will be met in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, we remain concerned that the infrastructure for discovering and developing new antibacterials continues to stagnate, thereby risking the future pipeline of antibacterial drugs."
Helen W. Boucher et al.
Clinical Infectious Diseases
November 26, 2008
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08/11/2008 Superbugs: The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat.
"In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital, and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee recalled recently."
Jerome Groopman
The New Yorker
August 11, 2008
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07/18/2008 Science, Special Issue: Deadly Defiance
"Get an infection, take an antibiotic. That simple, sensible, and often life-saving intervention, repeated myriad times, has triggered an ever-escalating war between humans and microbes--a war the microbes seem to be winning. Almost as soon as penicillin was introduced in 1942, the bacteria it was designed to defeat began evolving to resist it. Now many common bacteria have acquired resistance to multiple antibiotics, making some infections extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to treat."
Leslie Roberts and Stephen Simpson
Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, p. 355
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07/10/2008 Hospitals Losing Fight Against Superbugs
"The Royal Society will say that we are heading towards a "pre-antibiotic" era with no effective treatment for some infections."
Kate Devlin
Telegraph
July 10, 2008
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02/01/2008 Insurgents in the Bloodstream
"A bacterial outbreak of historic proportions threatens wounded troops when they're most vulnerable."
Captain Chas Henry, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Proceedings Magazine, US Naval Institute
February 2008
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01/28/2008 Constant Struggle to Conquer Bacteria
"Since the early 1990s, drug companies that had built their businesses on early antibiotic research have been leaving the field. As a consequence, there has been a steady decline in the number of new antibiotics approved by the FDA - even as the existing ones are losing ground to a surge of drug-resistant bacterial strains such as Staphylococcus aureus. In the five-year period from 1983 through 1987, the FDA approved 16 new antibiotics. During a similar five-year span that ended last year, only five made the cut."
Sabin Russel
San Francisco Chronicle
January 28. 2008
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10/17/2007 Deadly Bacteria Found to Be More Common
"Nearly 19,000 people died in the United States in 2005 after being infected with virulent drug-resistant bacteria that have spread rampantly through hospitals and nursing homes, according to the most thorough study of the disease’s prevalence ever conducted. ... If the mortality estimates are correct, the number of deaths associated with the germ, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, would exceed those attributed to H.I.V.-AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, emphysema or homicide each year."
Kevin Sack
New York Times
October 17, 2007
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