BOSTON – An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: Bacteria that have been made resistant to nearly all antibiotics by an alarming new gene have sickened people in three states and are popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday.

The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.

How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.
Scientists have long feared this — a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance, creating dangerous "superbugs."

"It's a great concern," because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "It's just a matter of time" until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person, he said.

Grayson heads an American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.

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.

"We want physicians to look for it," especially in patients who have traveled recently to India or Pakistan, she said.

What can people do?

Don't add to the drug resistance problem, experts say. Don't pressure your doctors for antibiotics if they say they aren't needed, use the ones you are given properly, and try to avoid infections by washing your hands.

The gene is carried by bacteria that can spread hand-to-mouth, which makes good hygiene very important.

It's also why health officials are so concerned about where the threat is coming from, said Dr. Patrice Nordmann, a microbiology professor at South-Paris Medical School. India is an overpopulated country that overuses antibiotics and has widespread diarrheal disease and many people without clean water.

"The ingredients are there" for widespread transmission, he said. "It's going to spread by plane all over the world."

The U.S. patients were not related. The California woman needed hospital care after being in a car accident in India. The Illinois man had pre-existing medical problems and a urinary catheter, and is thought to have contracted an infection with the gene while traveling in India. The case from Massachusetts involved a woman from India who had surgery and chemotherapy for cancer there and then traveled to the U.S.

Lab tests showed their germs were not killed by the types of drugs normally used to treat drug-resistant infections, including "the last-resort class of antibiotics that physicians go to," Limbago said.

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.

hope they don't turn into zombies... seems like all the zombie movies started with a headline like this...


there is a video here...
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4337734/superbug-nightmare-erupting-in-three-states

We have had these super bugs since the seventies.

Too many antibiotics prescribed and too many people using them incorrectly created quite a few super bugs.

Staph has a couple of strains
TB has a strain
The flesh eating disease is one

i agree with you there, anytime people start taking antibiotics, it just lessons your immune system... they should only be used as a last resort....

What happens is people take the antibiotic until they feel better which is usually 3 to 5 days and then they stop but the bacteria is still alive in their body, it is just weakened so the bacteria live through the attack on it and it makes babies that are resistant to the medicine. It is important to take the antibiotics as prescribed until the pills are all gone so the bacteria is killed completely.

i try not to take any antibiotics at all, but then again, i'm the type that thinks your body can take care of most problems without help.

I too am a naturalist. I always try to fix myself naturally before I ask for help.

The docs have gotten so used to it they usually ask me "do I want the meds or not". They will tell me what I can do to help myself without the meds also.

Same with the neurologists, they just let me do what I do because it seems to be working okay.

A lot of it is a positive attitude, you have to start there for your health to be better. It can't cure everything but it helps you deal with everything.

they're in California