Friday Blues

We're all gonna die!

A connection between obesity and antibiotics?

Yellowstone, more exciting than we think?

Glaciers collapsing.

Murdering hope.

What the overuse and misuse of antibiotics

Has led us to:

New drug-resistant superbugs found in 3 states

The U.S. cases occurred this year in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois, said Brandi Limbago, a lab chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.

[snip]

She did not know how the three patients were treated, but all survived.
Doctors have tried treating some of these cases with combinations of antibiotics, hoping that will be more effective than individual ones are. Some have resorted to using polymyxins — antibiotics used in the 1950s and '60s that were unpopular because they can harm the kidneys.

The two Canadian cases were treated with a combination of antibiotics, said Dr. Johann Pitout of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. One case was in Alberta, the other in British Columbia.

Both patients had medical emergencies while traveling in India. They developed urinary infections that were discovered to have the resistance gene once they returned home to Canada, Pitout said.

The CDC advises any hospitals that find such cases to put the patient in medical isolation, check the patient's close contacts for possible infection, and look for more infections in the hospital.

Any case "should raise an alarm," Limbago said.

And the next step is....

To stop using antibiotics. Right?

At a hearing of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday, July 14, 2010, a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) finally caught up with the rest of the world -- and his peers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- and admitted that the use of antibiotics in farm animal feed is contributing to the growing problem of deadly antibiotic resistance in America.

Dr. John Clifford, Deputy Administrator for Veterinary Services for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) read from his previously submitted testimony that the USDA believes it is likely that U.S. use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does lead to some cases of resistance in humans and the animals.

Tell the FDA to Save Antibiotics

Tell the FDA: Protect Human and Animal Health by Saving Antibiotics

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering a rule that could weaken already-lenient controls on the use of antibiotics in food animal production.

The new rule affects the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD), a program allowing veterinarians to prescribe antibiotics mixed into animal feed in new ways. Currently, the VFD ensures that for those new antibiotic uses a diagnosis is made before animals are given antibiotics in their feed.

Many industrial farms routinely feed antibiotics to poultry or livestock to compensate for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, while promoting growth. Proposed changes to the VFD could weaken oversight that prevents unnecessary drug use - increasing the rate of antibiotic resistance in humans.

Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are fed to healthy food animals. Weakening the VFD could breed dangerous new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans thus making these important drugs we depend on useless.

Send your comment now. Tell the FDA to protect human and animal health by rejecting this rule and saving antibiotics.

One more reason not to eat beef

FDA is going to allow beef to be treated with an antibiotic that is one of the last defenses against serious infections. Misuse of antibiotics is the reason they have had to develop cefquinome:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous - for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defense against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has ever been approved in the United States for use in animals.

The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotic, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.

Echoing those concerns, the FDA's advisory board last fall voted to reject the request by InterVet Inc. of Millsboro, Del., to market the drug for cattle.

Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented "guidance document" that codifies how to weigh threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs.

Blowback in the form of bacteria

Acinetobacter baumannii. Straight from the ruins of Baghdad through Europe into the US via our soldiers.

Firedoglake:

In many ways, the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" has been able to accomplish things that the terrorists themselves could only dream of. It has divided the American public against each other. It has stretched our military so thin that we would be helpless in the face of a real national emergency. And now, it has bred its own drug-resistant biological weapons, one of which is rapidly making its way through civilian hospitals from California to Canada, on to Germany and Anbar Province. It's called acinetobacter baumannii and the US military not only created the conditions that led to its development, but the Pentagon has played an active role in exporting it to the world and in the suppression of information that could have led to its containment.
[snip]
But this is part and parcel with the government's strategy for "fighting terror" with speeches and photo-ops and letting the underfunded, ill-equipped military cope with the unintended consequences of their disastrously mis-planned war(s). The whole reason we have this bug is because the combat hospitals in Iraq have never been adequately supplied, sterilized, or maintained...

BBC has two articles from 2004

HPA chief executive Professor Pat Troop said: "Cases of beta-lactamase resistant E.Coli and Acinetobacter baumannii are occurring in hospitals and the communities.

"Although they are not as widespread as MRSA, these infections are very difficult to treat, making it crucial that they are brought under control at an early stage."

and 2005.

Acinetobacter baumannii

Acinbetobacter is a type of bacterium that can be found in may sources in the environment, including drinking water, soil, sewage and food.

Infection from most strains is rare, but there are a few, including baumannii, which can cause infection in hospital patients who are already unwell.

Such infections can include bloodstream, wound and urinary tract infections, and can become difficult to treat if they become resistant to antibiotics.

Wikipedia:

In November, 2004, the CDC reported an increasing number of A. baumannii bloodstream infections in patients at military medical facilities in which service members injured in the Iraq/Kuwait region during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) were treated.^[4] Most of these were multidrug-resistant. Among one set of isolates from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 13 (35%) were susceptible to imipenem only, and two (4%) were resistant to all drugs tested. One antimicrobial agent, colistin (polymyxin E), has been used to treat infections with multidrug-resistant A. baumannii; however, antimicrobial susceptibility testing for colistin was not performed on isolates described in this report. Because A. baumannii can survive on dry surfaces for up to 20 days, they pose a high risk of spread and contamination in hospitals, potentially putting immune-compromised and other patients at risk for drug resistant infections that are often fatal and generally expensive to treat.