US sees 1st case of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics

EU agency wants 65 pct cut in farm use of last-ditch antibiotic

NEW YORK, May 27, (Agencies): US health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to all known antibiotics, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not travelled within the prior five months.

Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, DC, said the infection was not controlled even by colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”

Infection

The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.

“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”

The patient visited a clinic on April 26 with symptoms of a urinary tract inout fection, according to the study, which did not describe her current condition. Authors of the study could not immediately be reached for comment.

The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.

“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.

In the United States, antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually.

The mcr-1 gene was found last year in people and pigs in China, raising alarm.

The potential for the superbug to spread from animals to people is a major concern, Cassell said.

For now, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from it and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.

Experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.

Frieden said the need for new antibiotics is one of the more urgent health problems, as bugs become more and more resistant to current treatments.

Meanwhile, Britain told the G7 industrial powers on Friday to do more to fight killer superbugs as the United States reported the first case in the country of a patient with bacteria resistant to a last-resort antibiotic.

In Japan, British Prime Minister David Cameron said leading countries needed to tackle resistance by reducing the use of antibiotics and rewarding drug companies for developing new medicines.

“In too many cases antibiotics have stopped working. That means people are dying of simple infections or conditions like TB (tuberculosis), tetanus, sepsis, infections that should not mean a death sentence,” he told a news conference at a summit in Japan.

Other countries have already seen multi-drug resistant superbugs that no antibiotic can fight. So far, the United States has not.

But this sets the stage for that development, CDC officials said.

The CDC is working with Pennsylvania health officials to interview the woman and her family to try to figure how she might have picked up the strain. The woman had not traveled outside of the country recently, officials said.

Also:

LONDON: LONDON: Agricultural use of a lastresort antibiotic should be cut by twothirds to limit the spread of dangerous drug resistance, European medicine regulators said on Thursday.

The demand for strict curbs on giving colistin to animals is the latest in a string of warnings about antimicrobial resistance. It follows the discovery last year of a gene that makes bacteria resistant to the drug.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said farm use of colistin should be limited to a maximum of 5 mg per adjusted kilogram of livestock. The drug is currently widely used in farming.

“If successfully applied at an EU level, the above threshold would result in an overall reduction of approximately 65 percent of the current sales of colistin for veterinary use,” the EMA said.

Ideally, consumption should be even lower and the EMA said 1 mg or less was a “desirable” level, adding that

Denmark Denmark and The The Netherlands Netherlands already achieved this goal. Other countries, including Spain Spain and Italy, Italy, have far higher consumption.

Colistin, which has been used for more than 50 years in both animals and people, is given in human medicine as a last-line treatment for infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria, or socalled “superbugs”.