Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
A Blog by Maryn McKenna
FRI, 12/18/2015
Last night, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, which carried the initial report of resistance to the last-ditch drug colistin, published five letters from researchers announcing they too have found the MCR gene in additional countries: France; the Netherlands; and Algeria, Laos, and Thailand. Those are in addition to previous reports of the gene being found in bacteria from China (which started this story), Malaysia, Portugal (probably), Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
That’s 10 countries so far, and, sources say, more to come.
Brief catch-up: In November, researchers in China and the UK announced that they had identified this gene—which confers resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin—in bacteria recovered from live pigs and from retail meat, and bacterial samples stored from hospital patients. This is worrisome because, as waves of high-level antibiotic resistance have moved across the world, colistin has been the one drug that still worked.
One reason it still worked was that it is not a very good drug. It kills bacteria, but it is toxic to organs, and so human medicine had kept it on the shelf—and thus, bacteria had not developed much resistance to it. But it turns out that while medicine was conserving the drug carefully, agriculture—especially in China, but also in Europe and on other continents—was using it by the ton, pumping up the selective pressure that encourages bacteria to develop resistance in order to protect themselves.
There are some things worth heeding in these new reports.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE
FRI, 12/18/2015
Last night, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, which carried the initial report of resistance to the last-ditch drug colistin, published five letters from researchers announcing they too have found the MCR gene in additional countries: France; the Netherlands; and Algeria, Laos, and Thailand. Those are in addition to previous reports of the gene being found in bacteria from China (which started this story), Malaysia, Portugal (probably), Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
That’s 10 countries so far, and, sources say, more to come.
Brief catch-up: In November, researchers in China and the UK announced that they had identified this gene—which confers resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin—in bacteria recovered from live pigs and from retail meat, and bacterial samples stored from hospital patients. This is worrisome because, as waves of high-level antibiotic resistance have moved across the world, colistin has been the one drug that still worked.
One reason it still worked was that it is not a very good drug. It kills bacteria, but it is toxic to organs, and so human medicine had kept it on the shelf—and thus, bacteria had not developed much resistance to it. But it turns out that while medicine was conserving the drug carefully, agriculture—especially in China, but also in Europe and on other continents—was using it by the ton, pumping up the selective pressure that encourages bacteria to develop resistance in order to protect themselves.
There are some things worth heeding in these new reports.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE