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CDC: Deadly Superbug “C-Diff” Spreading
CDC officals say Clostridium Difficile is killing more people each year.
Reporting Kate Merrill
DENNIS (CBS) – Three months after having knee replacement surgery, Kathleen Powers of Dennis is finally feeling well enough to do something as simple as make herself a cup of tea.
Her slow recovery has nothing to do with her knee. An infection she picked up either in the hospital or in the rehab facility ravaged her digestive system. “You feel like all of your life’s energy is being sucked out of you,” she said.
Tests confirmed Kathleen had C-Diff which is short for Clostridium Difficile. It’s a bacterium that attacks your intestines.
“You feel like you’re not going to get better and you feel like you’re dying,” she said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, C-Diff kills thousands of people every year and that number is growing.
“It’s between three and six-fold more common than Read more…
FDA Could Kill Millions of Us
Forbes magazine Editor in Chief Steve Forbes warns that the Food and Drug Administration’s foot-dragging on approving new antibiotics is leading to the “potential catastrophe” of a “bacterial apocalypse.”
The FDA has been making the approval of new drugs increasingly burdensome in recent years, Forbes — who was a Republican candidate for president in 1996 and 2000 — writes in a Forbes magazine editorial.
“The FDA’s behavior is no surprise to the organization’s watchers,” he says. “Approve a medication that has an unintended side effect and congressional headline-seekers will be giving officials the third degree. Better to let people die by depriving them of new medicines.”
As a result of the FDA’s foot-dragging, the pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up, according to Forbes.
Antibiotics have saved tens of millions of lives since the 1940s, but bacteria can become drug-resistant and new drugs are constantly needed to keep pace with new killer germs. But the flow of new antibiotics “has slowed to a trickle,” Forbes observes in the editorial headlined “How the FDA May Kill Millions of Us.”
One reason is that research is becoming more expensive, discouraging pharmaceutical companies from Read more…
Three Cases of Cholera Confirmed by New York City Officials
The first known cases of cholera in New York since the outbreak of the disease in Haiti last year were confirmed on Saturday by city officials.
A commercial laboratory notified health officials on Friday that three New Yorkers had developed diarrhea and dehydration, classic symptoms of the disease, after returning from a wedding on Jan. 22 and 23 in the Dominican Republic, where the government has been trying to prevent the disease from spreading from neighboring Haiti.
The three who contracted cholera were adults who returned to the city within days of the wedding.
None were hospitalized. Dr. Sharon Balter, a medical epidemiologist for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said on Saturday that the victims had all recovered.
Officials declined to release the names of the patients or where they lived.
City health officials are now working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to determine what the New York victims ate and to see if the strain of the disease they contracted is linked to the cholera epidemic that has ravaged Haiti, killing thousands since October and infecting many more.
“We’re providing support to the state, with lab testing, in determining which strain” is at issue, said Candice Burns Hoffmann, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C. “And I know there is an Read more…
DEADLY SUPERBUG NDM-1 in BRITAIN
The bacteria have spread from India and Pakistan and are now being found in hospitals here
Back in 1987 Dr. Robin Cook wrote the medical thriller “Outbreak.” The best-selling novel focused on a team of brilliant medical researchers desperately racing against time to stop a deadly virus from spreading across the United States and potentially killing millions.
Once again fiction becomes reality as England faces its own potentially deadly outbreak with the looming possibility that a superbug from India could bring mass fatalities and spread like wildfire across an unprotected population.
According to the British Health Protection Agency (HPA), a virulent super-bacteria called NDM-1 has invaded the island nation from the Indian sub-continent and Pakistan.
Concerned health professionals have found the bacteria cropping up in hospitals across the country.
Bacteriologists are now burning the midnight oil in a desperate attempt to get a handle on a disease that has the ability to kill thousands.
Superbugs—of which the NDM-1 bacteria is one—are resistant to Read more…
Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria – “Arms Race” Between Nature and Tech?
NDM-1 was first detected in Klebsiella pneumoniae (pictured here) but has since been found in other strains including E. coli.
A recent spike of infections in the United Kingdom involving bacteria armed with an enzyme that makes them resistant to virtually all antibiotics has many health experts concerned. The enzyme, called NDM-1, was first identified in 2009 in a patient in New Delhi, India infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae (NDM-1 stands for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase). Since then, the gene that produces NDM-1 has been found in many different strains of bacteria, including E. coli, and infections involving these “superbugs” has become an ongoing health problem in many parts of India and Pakistan. Now, a recent publication in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases describing the discovery of NDM-1 in 37 patients in the UK (many of which had travelled to India or Pakistan) has clearly demonstrated the potential for this to become a global crisis. Bacteria harboring NDM-1 have now been found in the United States, Japan, and Canada.
Despite the dire warnings of health experts, NDM-1 Read more…
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