Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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More on 'Nightmare Bacteria': Maybe Even Worse Than We Thought?

July 30, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Flickr: CelesteH, CC

In my last post I talked about the under-appreciated emergence of “nightmare bacteria” (those are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s words, not mine) that are widely distributed in hospitals and nursing homes around the world and do not respond to a last-ditch small family of antibiotics called carbapenems. That seemed dire enough, but new research suggests the problem, bad as it looks, has been understated.

There’s an ahead-of-print article in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy whose authors include David Shlaes, a physician-researcher and former pharmaceutical executive, now consultant, and Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease physician on the UCLA medical faculty and author among other books of Rising Plague, about antibiotic resistance. In a commentary examining the Food and Drug Administration’s promised “reboot” of antibiotic development rules, they analyze privately gathered data on resistance in the United States and conclude the incidence of highly resistant bacteria is greater than the CDC has estimated.

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Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CDC, CMO, CRE, CRKP, drug development, FDA, KPC, NDM-1, Resistance, Science Blogs

Where 'Nightmare Bacteria' Came From, And How Our Inattention Helped Them Emerge

July 25, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Zebbie (CC), Flickr

Cast your minds back a few months ago, to when the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced, “We have a very serious problem” with “nightmare bacteria,” and the chief medical officer of the United Kingdom backed him up a few days later, describing a “ticking time bomb” that threatens national security as seriously as terrorism.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CDC, CMO, CRE, CRKP, KPC, NDM-1, Resistance, Science Blogs

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