Prolly no real need to worry about Trump, anyway:
For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal “the end of the road” for antibiotics.
The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”
Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, which health officials have dubbed “nightmare bacteria.” In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country’s most urgent public health threats.
Health officials said the case in Pennsylvania, by itself, is not cause for panic. The strain found in the woman is treatable with some other antibiotics. But researchers worry that the antibiotic-resistant gene found in the bacteria, known as mcr-1, could spread to other types of bacteria that can already evade other types of antibiotics.
This is very, very, very serious.
EZSmirkzz
So when will we start talking about the chickens coming home to roost? It’s in our food as well.
Also too, no one could have predicted…
Brachiator
I guess this means that “The Walking Dead” is really a documentary.
redshirt
PANIC!
I’m sure the Republicans will offer up a solid response.
chopper
i guess AL decided to pull the post she put up 3 minutes before cole clicked ‘submit’.
Corner Stone
So serious that just reporting on it killed a blog post by AL.
Omnes Omnibus
Apocalypse day on Balloon Juice?
Corner Stone
@Brachiator: “When civilization ends…it ends fast.”
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, Trump did hit the number to clinch the R nomination…
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Seems that way. Did you read Alain’s post?
jackmac
And when President Obama requests millions of dollars in aid to help find a solution, what will be the reaction from the bullies and spoiled children running the U.S. Congress? Obama’s recent Zika emergency fund request — severely reduced and with Republicians seeking offsetting cuts in other part of the budget — is instructive.
redshirt
@chopper: Cole is like a moose in China.
joel hanes
No worry.
The invisible hand of the market will incent the pharma companies to spend billions and billions to create new antibiotics to save lives, although they could make much much more money by spending a few million to develop yet another drug to manage serum cholesterol or excess stomach acid.
Won’t it?
Trollhattan
Perhaps zika will give us immunity to All The Bacteria while merely costing us a hunk o’ our brains, which Republicans demonstrate daily are overrated anyway. Win-win.
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: Robots are going to take over before that and harvest us for energy. We can ask Martin for confirmation.
Jeff
Survival of the fittest is about to be put in use again. Lots of old billionaires will probably die. The horror.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Yep.
john smallberries
Be very afraid…….
no, wait – Homo Sapiens and its antecedents lived without antibiotics for multi millennia.
We will just go back to people dying from cuts or bad oysters.
RoonieRoo
Of all the things I read today, this one scared me the most.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Dooomed. We’re dooomed…
Soylent Green
This is why I carry a towel with me at all times.
JPL
As we all know, both Trump and Sanders are narcissistic. Today I imagined Sanders joining the Trump team as his VP. The idea that Sanders is willing to debate Trump in a Hillary hate fest, convinced me of the possibility. After all Trump wants the republican party to become the the workers party.
Someone talk me down.
CaseyL
No, it doesn’t necessarily mean any of those things.
it means we need to find something other than antibiotics to fight bacterial diseases.
The Soviets used phages, and I thought I read that phage therapy was making a comeback. Phages are, if I understand correctly, bacteria tailor-made to eat disease-causing bacteria. How this is done is beyond me, but ti seems to be effective.
joel hanes
@Soylent Green:
This is why I carry a towel with me at all times.
Truly you are a hoopty frood.
Roger Moore
@joel hanes:
It may take only a few million to develop those drugs- probably more than that, but not billions- but the marketing will be very expensive given how crowded the market is. The problem with developing new antibiotics- especially last-chance antibiotics- is that doctors are supposed to limit their use to cases that genuinely need them. That’s no way to make money.
OTOH, a smart drug company would see developing antibiotic resistance as a positive boon. It’s like planned obsolescence for drugs. They won’t have to worry about competition from older generation generics because the bacteria will already be resistant!
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
Actually, they’re viruses that target bacteria instead of people. There are naturally occurring phages, and it should be possible to engineer them to make them more effective. There are even some that are quite specific in the kinds of bacteria they attack.
Roger Moore
@Soylent Green:
I would think the peril-sensitive glasses would be a better choice.
Corner Stone
@CaseyL:
I thought they were a character storyline in one of the online fantasy games Cole plays?
The Dangerman
@redshirt:
Targeted tax cuts?
different-church-lady
I’m pretty sure cases of Trump are already resistant to antibiotics. Not to mention penicillin, and even reason.
Mike in NC
Drumpf’s yooooouge wall is going to keep out the scary foreign bacteria.
joel hanes
@Roger Moore:
the marketing will be very expensive given how crowded the market is.
Yes.
OTOH, once one starts taking SuperZoom for cholesterol managment, one takes it every day for the rest of one’s life; maybe five thousand doses or even ten thousand doses per prescription win.
The problem with effective antibiotics is that one takes ten or twenty doses and then is cured — and the new frontline last-ditch antibiotic will be prescribed to far fewer patients than the cholesterol drug.
So even if the development and marketing costs are equal, the antibiotic must sell for at least hundreds of times more per dose than the cholesterol reducer — ten doses must be priced above a thousand dollars for there to be any upside at all.
Mike R
@The Dangerman: Sounds good, eliminate the estate tax, of course this is said in jest.
Shell
Unortunately, it seems to be human nature to develop amnesia after a crisis is over. Thinking of the 1918 flu pandemic that swept thru and killed close to 40 million people worldwide. (including my grandmothers first husband. She said you could see people just collapsing in the streets.) But were no more prepared to deal with a sudden deadly flu outbreak than then.
M. Bouffant
Overpopulate the planet & push it to its limits; it will strike back.
Ripley
Anyway, thanks for all the fish.
CaseyL
@Roger Moore:
Thanks for the correction – I almost said viruses rather than bacteria, but figured I was mis-remembering because the Soviets had been working with phages for decades, and I didn’t think artificial viruses were around that long ago.
Face
Those superbacteria are being wantonly spread by trans peeps using women’s bathrooms. Notice how there’s no reported cases in NC? Huh? HUH?
RaflW
I decided not to read Alain’s piece about climate change this a.m. But I think the one-two punch of climate mayhem and 50% mortality superbugs will be mother nature’s way of sayin’ y’all done used this place up, and now it’s time for the plant to shake off a whole lotta you.
I am flip, but I am also deeply concerned. The absolutely idiotic Republican government too many ‘Mericans prefer can’t even deal with Zika in a timely manner. Shit is gonna fail, and fail hard. If we have a Trumpenfuhrer it’ll be over, we’ll be a smoking ruin in no time at all.
rikyrah
Stories like this scare me to death.
WarMunchkin
@different-church-lady: Nonono, I have a great relationship with the antibiotics. I know all of the best antibiotics, and by the way, the antibiotics, they love me. I’m going to get all the best antibiotics in a room and give it to the patient, and the dose, by the way, just got 10mg higher.
Schlemazel Khan
@shomi:
As someone who knows for a fact that they are only here because of antibiotics I do not see concern at the end of effective antibiotics as fear mongering. You do know that, during the 20th Century the son of the President of the United States died from a blister he got playing tennis at the White House? People died from impacted teeth, people had limbs amputated just to try to save their life by removing infected limbs?
Richard Mayhew
@joel hanes: so a damn good case for massive federal research and development funding
Gimlet
H.G. Wells predicted this. This time the aliens exposed us to it. They’re going to pass out infested blankets at the Republican convention. We’re doomed!!1!!
redshirt
@WarMunchkin: Upvote
Anne Laurie
If you’re interested in news like this, I cannot recommend Maryn McKenna’s National Geographic blog Germination highly enough.
Here’s a recent sample:
RaflW
@Richard Mayhew:
Hahahahah, Republican House caucus. All you need to know ’bout that (not wrong, but hopeless) idea.
@Anne Laurie: Look, I’m sure she is right, there is hope. Except that human history is littered with stories of collective action failure. I’m pretty sure we’ll need a couple of 1918 scale bacterial plague death-a-thons before folks like her will be listened to. If then.
JPL
@rikyrah: A few decades ago, there was discussion among my son’s doctors, about using an antibiotic that is only available at the hospital. We took a different approach and cleaned his diet. The choice was prescription baby food or chicken and rice. Nothing of color so it was limiting. Since he was in middle school at the time, he did the rice or chicken. Fortunately, it worked and he’s pretty healthy now. He was prescribed cipro shortly after the anthrax attack in our country, though. He was an adult but still living at home at the time, and called to complain about the cost. Fifteen minutes later, his bank called to check and make sure it was him getting the drug. He hasn’t been sick since, so reports such as the one today, scare me.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
Phages aren’t artificial; bacteria get viruses the same as eukaryotes. IIRC, the Russians were just culturing them and using them as a treatment.
joel hanes
@Richard Mayhew:
a damn good case for massive federal research and development funding
So you’re saying we’re screwed, then?
Because barring a miracle, the Rs will hold the House, the House holds the purse strings.
Alain the site fixer
My overall point wasn’t we’re doomed so much as the fact that a lot of turmoil that challenges our systems that have worked for the past few centuries is related and it’s the unseen effect of climate change on us already. but it’s hard to not be worried upon reading such news even if it was bound to happen in the next few months because of our awesome transportation and tech.
Elie
Some phages can also confer antibiotic resistance to some bacteria. They have multiple roles…. viral dna and/or RNA can be subsumed into bacteria’s genes/dna…
This is at my limits of knowledge but this is a very serious situation — I have even stopped using bleach too broadly. It is a powerful antiseptic but a lot of times unless you need to kill known germy things, you are just as well off just using nice hot soap and water, rinsing and air drying. There has been a lot of overuse of antibacterial soaps. Vinegar is also a nice cleaner and has natural antiseptic properties …
Alain the site fixer
@Elie: We prefer vinegar for many cleaning purposes. Also much nicer to the environment. But non toxic residue and gas so friendly to most pets and humans.
Damien
Ive been writing a TV series about the great plagues of humanity, and the way they impacted humanity’s development. The last season is this. It is the end of everything we’ve built because we couldn’t stop the microscopic hordes.
Also another reason why I won’t have children.
schrodinger's cat
@JPL: Trump’s anti-Semitic base is not going to like that.
Anne Laurie
@RaflW: Back in 1973, during my first semester in college, I made the mistake of signing up for a senior-level course in population ecology. Part of which was a half-page long block of mathematical symbols which, correctly used, was supposed to give biologists a reasonably certain date after which an explosively reproducing species in a closed environment would crash catastrophically (>90% die-off). The equation was intended for species like voles in a meadow, but of course some of the students ran the sequence using human beings on a closed planet. And reported back to the professor & the rest of us that — depending on which population estimates one started with — the “crash date” for Homo sapiens sapiens was somewhere around… 1983.
Professor promptly shut down further speculation by announcing that, since there was “nothing that could be done about it”, we “simply shouldn’t waste time working on it.”
Of course, outside that lecture hall, there was plenty that could be and was done to avert that particular dystopian future, but it did pretty well confirm my native Cynicism about the eternal glories of mighty Mankind…
amygdala
@jackmac:
President Obama signed an Executive Order in 2014 appointing a multiagency Task Force to address antibiotic resistance. I’m not sure how that was paid for, but they put out their Action Plan a little over a year ago.
Another alarming aspect is ongoing concern about the robustness of the Infectious Disease (ID) work force. Applications to ID training programs has fallen off in recent years, so we’re not training as many ID docs as we could. Like a lot of so-called cognitive specialties, ID is time-consuming, in addition to being less well-compensated than procedure-based fields.
I don’t know what WHO and other high income countries are up to. This needs to be a global effort.
Elie
@Anne Laurie:
While I have a slight bias towards humanity, I very well appreciate that in the end, we are just another biological form that necessarily complies with the imperatives of the natural world. We will come to more than one possible demise — quite possible earlier than our biology dictates but more in line with the religious/philosophical — that the earth or God or Gods exterminate us out of defense of the planet. Mostly I think we are just one dominant life form that can be replaced by another. Knowing how evolution works, that is just the way it is….
Mnemosyne
@Anne Laurie:
Honestly, I think a lot of men of that era genuinely didn’t realize that if women have safe and effective birth control, the vast majority of them will choose to have 2 or fewer children. “Overpopulation” is only a problem in areas where women are not allowed to control their own fertility.
And not having effective antibiotics will suck really, really bad and kill many people but it’s actually something I think we have the knowledge to adapt to. The human race survived many centuries of not understanding that washing your hands could prevent disease.
joel hanes
The human race survived many centuries of not understanding that washing your hands could prevent disease.
By living mostly in small isolated groups with very limited face-to-face interaction with outsiders.
Xenophobia was adaptive.
ob. book: Earth Abides, George R Stewart
Roger Moore
@Elie:
You shouldn’t worry about using bleach. It’s not something clever and subtle like antibiotics that takes advantage of an Achilles heel and thus can be defeated by eliminating that weakness. It’s more like soap and water: something that massively overwhelms the bacteria with brute force. There might be bacteria that could survive in bleach- there are ones that can survive boiling temperatures and massive radiation- but they would have a hard time doing that while remaining pathogenic.
Jeffro
@M. Bouffant:
I think I saw that storyline in The Authority…awesome!
Meanwhile, if anyone wants to subscribe while the power/intertubes are still on: cser.org
Schlemazel Khan
@shomi:
Please, feel free to go fuck yourself. My point is that losing antibiotics is a big deal, sorry we can’t all be so jaded and cool as you.
NotMax
Ahem.
Jump off the Twitter tweadmill and read your own blog from time to time.
redshirt
@NotMax: Are you talking to John Cole?
Do you know he doesn’t read his own blog, like at all? You’d be better served responding to him on twitter.
Sicilian Dish
Didn’t you hear? In Republican America there are no public health emergencies. We’ll have to wait until one of Paul Ryan’s kids gets bit by the Zika-squito. Or the newly pregnant wife of some tea party no-nothing throws an encephalic baby. Or the entire state of Oklahoma dies from a resistant strain of e-coli obtained from eating meat produced in the unregulated free market. Capitalism is awesome.
Mnemosyne
@joel hanes:
I specified centuries, not millennia, specifically to highlight the fact that the human race survived crowded, filthy, diverse cities like London or Cairo in the pre-antibiotics days.
SRW1
@shomi:
That must be why virtually all of the big drug companies have gotten out of the antibiotics business, genius.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat: LOL. You go, girl!
StringOnASick
The last I read about this topic in Scientific American, the big research for replacement antibiotics was being conducted by the army. I’d call that unlimited research funding by a motivated group. We could sto feeding them to farm animals for weight gain; just a thought
joel hanes
@Mnemosyne:
Not picking a fight, but until about 1920, most of the world’s human inhabitants lived in rural circumstances or small towns and villages. Yes, there were conurbations, and at least some of them had mass-mortality plagues on occasion.
Ob. book : A Journal Of The Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Ella inNew Mexico
@CaseyL: phages and immune based therapies such as vaccines. We need to ramp up those human trials ASAP.
pseudonymous in nc
@Mnemosyne:
The human race did, but those cities burned through their populations something terrible. There was an In Our Time on London where the guests pointed out that the city wasn’t self-sustaining: it needed people coming in to seek their fortune in order to replace the ones who ended up dead in ditches.
MattF
Ars Technica has a less panicky view of the situation.
Please, everyone– Science can be hard and scary headlines can be clickbait. Yeah, antibiotic resistance is very bad and very serious, but it’s not yet the fifth horse of the Apocalypse.
J R in WV
Here’s a topic I can talk about for a bit. Chickenfeed, from the farm store, has tetracycline in it. So does Pig Feed, or another similar antibiotic drug. Partly it boosts the profits of the pharma corporations, selling more of the older antibiotics to feed companies. It allows the livestock to be raised and produced in more crowded living circumstances than without the drugs. Thus more profits in chicken breasts and thighs AND eggs too. And Bacon – you get more yield from the same pigs in a smaller barn.
Dairy is different, but even there they can use powerful drugs on a good cow to keep it producing for several more years, rather than dying off of an easily treated infection.
We didn’t buy the medicated feeds, our birds were outdoors birds, and pigs had a lot
outdoors they could lie in the sun on the hillside.But when the horse hurt her right hind foot, cut the hock into the bone on either an old piece of equipment or a piece of barbed wire, we used several quarts of penicillin, used old fashioned glass syringes from a vet who had actually worked for the U S Army Cavalry, reusable needles, got a 250 ml jar of the magic solution, 3 ccs in the neck twice a day, wash out the wound with the garden hose, spray it with foaming antiseptic, that bubbled and boiled necrotic tissue out of the depths of the wound. Then wrap it with a pamper and a leg wrap to keep it clean and dry, relatively so.
After 6 weeks of twice daily treatment, she was about healed up. WE kept her for several more years, till she went down in a bitter cold February. She was 28, IIRC, and 1800 pounds of sheer strength and energy. So the Antibiotics worked on Pet, our work horse.
She was so big and tall, and her feet so big, that riding her wasn’t like any other horse I had ridden. Walking was gentle and faster than you would expect. Trotting was horrible, her feet were so big it was like running a skateboard on the railroad track, on the ties. But her canter was amazing – smooth, fast, swooping along the ridges with the wind in the trees roaring and the branches swinging up and down, like being in the land of the Ents.
Then more recently, Mrs J got community acquired pneumonia while we were at the beach, not that we knew that at the time. She said one Thursday morning, “I don’t feel so good!” and 90 minutes later we were on the road home. Friday afternoon we were home, and she was quiet, not complaining. No coughing, no mucus anywhere. Saturday she was a little more goofy, still quiet. Sunday she was so weird I took her to the ER, where she uttered the magic words: when they asked her birth date, she said “1913”!
:
She was in an ER bed in 90 seconds, and a nurse took me around to a waiting area for families whose folk were being treated. Shortly a nice young ER Doc asked if I had any indication that MRs J had pneumonia, I said no symptoms at all, other than being remote, and drifty or goofy.
Then, when they asked me permission to put her on a vent in an induced medical coma, I first got scared… I said yes, as they indicated it would be therapeutic and intended to help her recover. The next day they made it clear that she had septic shock, and she may be subject to organ failure as her body redirected resources to combating the infections.
She was taking all the antibiotics, as they weren’t sure yet what the infection was, once the lab identified her infection(s) they took several off her current doses. She was on the vent for 21 days, and in the hospital for 67 more days, for a total of 79 days. She had a collapsed lung, minor surgery to implant a suction tube which was trying to reinflate that lobe of her left lung.
Later she had minor surgery to find and close the leak in that lung, the chest surgeon, an experienced guy with lots of respect from both the surgical teams and the other doctors said it should be a simple 20 or 30 minute job, and dropped me off in the surgical waiting room. 4 hours later he came back and told me how he had discovered that the third lobe of her left lung was necrotic, dead tissue rotting in her chest. He spent hours scraping and cleaning out the cavity, and patching the bottom of the remaining lower lobe of the lung. She had two chest tubes sucking blood and lymph, and once she had recovered a little, a really big CNA (to catch her if she fell!) and two RNs would walk her down the hall with two boxes for the chest tubes and two IV towers with her various drips.
But by Dog they cured her, and sent her home.
Just now I heard the midnight BBC radio news, and there was a bad factual error. When they talked about the SUPERBUG found in PA, he referred to it as an immune Ebola infection, which was completely wrong. The BBC, making that kind of error!!
No wonder we can’t figure out what going wrong, the reporters don’t know the difference between a virus and a bacteria. Was he shot with a knife or a gun? No. Not at all.
Well, if we can get our knees fixed up before all the local bugs get total immunity, so that we can travel a little, that will allow us to use up our remaining time here learning about the history of how we became who we are, and how different cultures succeed in different places.
Dying of an infection is slow and exceedingly painful, until it gets to some vital part, like your kidneys or liver, and then it goes a little faster, but more painful. Of course, if they use strong painkillers, you might get addicted to it, so that can’t be done either.
Woe is us. I really think the antibiotics in the livestock feed was the biggest mistake. Giving it to a kid when you aren’t sure if it’s a virus or a bacteria isn’t that serious, as your kid isn’t in a herd of other kids getting the same prescriptions, like a barn full of pigs is.
brendancalling
of course it was in PA. Because, really, where else? The state is full of mutants already, this just clinches it.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@jackmac: Yeah, and they’re the “pro life” party. They’re also the “small government” party and maybe they have to draw the line on spending somewhere, but does that somewhere have to be at severely deformed newborns? There are far, far better places to draw that line in the sand.
JH in AZ
As a Congressional Republican, I can assure you that this (super bacteria) is a hoax, designed by “scientists” to obtain funding dollars. Besides, if this was true, it would mean these bacteria are “evolving”, and we ALL know that that’s a myth from the pits of hell.