Journalist and Author
Drawing your attention: I have a story up tonight at CIDRAP on a new paper by Dr. Jan Kluytmans, a Dutch physician and microbiologist and one of the lead researchers tracking “pig MRSA,” ST398. (All past stories on ST398 here.) It’s a review paper, which is to say that it summarizes key existing findings rather […]
Happy New Year, constant readers. I’m honored and flattered to have had the chance to spend the past few years with you here. 2010 is going to be a big year — not just because SUPERBUG will be published, but because the issue of antibiotic resistance really, really is gathering force in the public mind. […]
From the research team at the University of Guelph Ontario Veterinary College — who have probably done more than any other group to elucidate MRSA in companion animals — comes a look at MRSA infections in dogs. In order to get better data, the team used a study model that is much-employed in human epidemiology […]
From the January issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the CDC (and therefore free. Must I keep urging you to read it? Go, already), here’s a roundup of bad news about bad bugs. In Canada, researchers from that country’s Public Health Agency have found a “strong correlation” between the use of ceftiofur, a third-generation […]
From the excellent and forward-thinking research team at Extending the Cure comes a dismaying report: over 7 years, a more than 3-fold increase in resistance in the Gram-negative bacterium Acinetobacter baumanii to its drug of last resort, imipenem. Because MRSA is a Gram-positive, we don’t talk much here about the Gram-negatives — the two categories […]
From a multi-state, public-private research team — Duke University, Wayne State University, and the Durham, NC VA — comes a precise and alarming calculation of MRSA’s costs in hospitals: For one post-surgery infection, $61,681. The group compared the course, costs and final outcome of three matched groups of patients from one tertiary-care center and six […]
Constant reader Pat Gardiner guided me to an enlightening post at the website of the agricultural magazine World Poultry that questions the routine use of antibiotics in food animals. It’s written by Wiebe van der Sluis, a Netherlands journalist from a farming background, founder of World Poultry and also the magazines Pig Progress and Poultry […]
I’m thrilled today to present another guest blogger: Dr. Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and author of the new book Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them (Prometheus Books). This new book is important reading for anyone […]
Via the Fresno Business Journal and the Torrance Daily Breeze come reports of a new study by California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development: Known MRSA cases in the state’s hospitals increased four-fold between 1999 and 2007, from 13,000 to 52,000 cases per year. From the Torrance paper: The good news is that the […]
It’s been 10 years since the publication of the pathbreaking Institute of Medicine report, “To Err is Human,” which for the first time focused policy attention on medical errors. The Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative has been running a two-week special series of posts to mark the occasion, and they very kindly asked me to […]
The New England Journal of Medicine has been running an open-access blog on H1N1 flu, and they’ve put up a post on when to give antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial pneumonia, including MRSA pneumonia, in flu patients. There’s a table of key clinical points to consider, and these important points are made: For the child […]
Folks: On Wednesday 2 December, at 9:30 a.m. EST, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) will host a Congressional briefing about antibiotic use in food animals. As a reminder, Rep. Slaughter is an MPH and Congress’s only microbiologist, and the chief sponsor of PAMTA, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act that proposes restricting antibiotic use […]
We’ve talked before about the shrinking number of drugs available to treat MRSA and about the challenges of getting new drugs to market. Well, it’s not just a problem in the United States. A new report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) — that’s the […]
It’s not very likely that people will be eating much pork today — OK, maybe some pancetta in the Brussels sprouts — and that’s good, because there’s lots of news today about MRSA in pigs. (In fact, there’s a ton of news just this week. Make it stop.) The European Food Safety Authority has published […]
Via Emerging Infectious Diseases comes the full version of a piece of research I posted on in September that was presented at the London conference Methicillin-resistant Staphylococci in Animals: Veterinary and Public Health Implications. A new MRSA variant — not ST398 — has been spotted in pigs in China. Luca Guardabassi and Arshnee Moodley of […]
A study published Tuesday in Emerging Infectious Diseases makes me happy, despite its grim import, because it confirms something that I will say in SUPERBUG: Community MRSA strains are moving into hospitals, blurring the lines between the two epidemics. The study is by researchers at the excellent Extending the Cure project of Resources for the […]
Some holiday reading: Mike the Mad Biologist, who often blogs about MRSA, has an analysis up about the varying degrees of attention that the Senate and House healthcare reform bills give antibiotic resistance and healthcare infections And Jacob Goldstein at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJHealth blog describes and links to a program at UCLA Medical […]
Over at CIDRAP, my colleague Lisa Schnirring writes tonight about the CDC’s concern over increasing numbers of deaths from bacterial pneumonia in people who have come down with H1N1 flu. We’ve talked about this before here. Our concern of course has been MRSA, and there is good evidence that there have been fatal MRSA infections […]
Via the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the excellent blog Fair Food Fight comes the story of two cows, from two Minnesota farms, that have been reprimanded by the US Food and Drug Administration for bringing cows to slaughter that turned out to have been massively overdosed with antibiotics. From the Strib: In a rare move, […]
UK and EU readers can hug themselves with self-congratulation this morning (OK, admittedly, for you it’s afternoon already): It’s Antibiotic Awareness Day across the European Union, featuring a slate of public-awareness activities, public-service announcements, educational efforts, and random appearances by the charming little hedgehog above (kicking antibiotics, don’t you see). It’s all meant to convince […]