"More killer germs resisting world's antibiotics"

From McClatchy Newspapers

The threat of death-defying bacteria, stubborn organisms that refuse to be conquered by antibiotic medicines, is growing more alarming.

Infectious microbes that used to be able to resist only one drug, such as penicillin or methicillin, now resist multiple drugs. Some can survive virtually every weapon in doctors' medicine cabinets.

``This is very worrisome,'' said Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University in Boston. ``In many cases, there might be only one or no drugs to treat (an infection). We are not keeping up with the bacteria.''

Two troubling recent developments:

Some bacteria have acquired the ability to ``eat'' the very antibiotic medicines that are supposed to eat them.
``Almost all the drugs that we consider as our mainline defense against bacterial infections are at risk from bacteria that not only resist the drugs but eat them for breakfast,'' George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, wrote in the April 4 issue of the journal Science.

A lethal new form of tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, that's virtually impossible to cure has exploded in Africa, Asia and Russia. There are also a small number of cases in the United States.
These XDR-TB bacteria possess ``such extensive drug resistance as to be nearly untreatable with currently available drugs,'' Sarita Shah, a epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, reported in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.