Post by sheredelight on Aug 16, 2010 17:33:11 GMT -5
LONDON | Wed Aug 11, 2010 5:45pm EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - A new superbug from India could spread around the world -- in part because of medical tourism -- and scientists say there are almost no drugs to treat it.
Researchers said on Wednesday they had found a new gene called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, in patients in South Asia and in Britain.
U.S. health officials said on Wednesday there had been three cases so far in the United States -- all from patients who received recent medical care in India, a country where people often travel in search of affordable healthcare.
NDM-1 makes bacteria highly resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class called carbapenems. Experts say there are no new drugs on the horizon to tackle it.
"It's a specific mechanism. A gene that confers a type of resistance (to antibiotics)," Dr. Alexander Kallen of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said in a telephone interview.
With more people traveling to find less costly medical treatments, particularly for procedures such as cosmetic surgery, Timothy Walsh, who led the study, said he feared the new superbug could soon spread across the globe.
"At a global level, this is a real concern," Walsh, from Britain's Cardiff University, said in telephone interview.
"Because of medical tourism and international travel in general, resistance to these types of bacteria has the potential to spread around the world very, very quickly. And there is nothing in the (drug development) pipeline to tackle it."
Almost as soon as the first antibiotic penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics.
But their overuse and misuse have helped fuel the rise of drug-resistant "superbug" infections like methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, or MRSA.
MEDICAL TOURISM
In a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, Walsh's team found NDM-1 was becoming more common in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and was also imported back to Britain in patients returning after treatment.
"India also provides cosmetic surgery for other Europeans and Americans, and it is likely NDM-1 will spread worldwide," the scientists wrote in the study.
Walsh and his international team collected bacteria samples from hospital patients in two places in India, Chennai and Haryana, and from patients referred to Britain's national reference laboratory from 2007 to 2009.
They found 44 NDM-1-positive bacteria in Chennai, 26 in Haryana, 37 in Britain, and 73 in other sites in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Several of the British NDM-1 positive patients had traveled recently to India or Pakistan for hospital treatment, including cosmetic surgery, they said.
NDM-1-producing bacteria are resistant to many antibiotics including carbapenems, the scientists said, a class of the drugs reserved for emergency use and to treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bugs like MRSA and C-Difficile.
Kallen of the CDC said the United States considered the infection a "very high priority," but said carbapenem resistance was not new in the United States. "The thing that is new is this particular mechanism," he said.
Experts cited two drugs that can stand up to carbapenem-resistant infections -- colistin, an older antibiotic that has some toxic side effects, and Pfizer's Tygacil.
For many years, antibiotic research has been a "Cinderella" sector of the pharmaceuticals industry, reflecting a mismatch between the scientific difficulty of finding treatments and the modest sales such products are likely to generate, since new drugs are typically saved only for the sickest patients.
But the increasing threat from superbugs is encouraging a rethink at the few large drugmakers still hunting for new antibiotics, including Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis.
Anders Ekblom, global head of medicines development at AstraZeneca, whose Merrem antibiotic was the leading carbapenem, said he saw "great value" in investing in new antibiotics.
"We've long recognized the growing need for new antibiotics, he said. "Bacteria are continually developing resistance to our arsenal of antibiotics and NDM-1 is just the latest example."
(
The recent fraudulent swine flu
“pandemic” has died out, and most the
millions spent on a vaccine will go
down the drain along with the unused
doses. Now these so-called
“scientists” in their search for more
free money are inventing another fraud.
I’d say it’s a pretty legitimate concern that if the bacteria that currently use the enzyme (e.coli and k.pneumonia) can pass that genetic trait on to deadlier bacteria, we’d be in a lot of trouble.
I don’t think the spirit of the article is to discourage medical tourism (which will happen despite the risks associated), but rather, to bring to light a troubling development in the antibiotic vs bacteria war.
Species seem to be Escherichia coli, Klebsiella, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It gets nasty when you are operated and too many of them cross the skin barrier. In hospitals it is notoriously difficult to eradicate such bugs.
I wish the above skeptics that they or their family be spared the experience.
See the article in the Journal of the Association of Physicians in India titled: An obituary- On the Death of antibiotics!
Editorial writer Abdul Ghafur writes: “…onsidering the fact that majority of Indian hospitals are struggling to hide their resistance statistics.”
He goes on to speak of the indiscriminate use of antibiotics that are CREATING this beast (uh…in reality there are now 22 different versions of the beast)and how apparently greed is not only allowing the spread, but encouraging it. This article is sort of pathetic, in my opinion, do a search for the other one if you want to read a good article.
Oh, and don’t ever, ever feed an elephant! Why? Because any that you are likely to come across in Asia have a good probability of having TB, and a significant chance of having multi-drug resistant TB–and that includes American circus elephants. Yes, this sounds like a joke, unfortunately it is not.
Looks like the so called scientists are afraid of keeping their high cost practise without giving appointments to needy, and then bombard them with repeated bills and rejected claims, restrict free access to medicines by running the presciption trap to earn from them, and not being available after 5:00 PM when people actually need you.
All these problems are eliminated in India as best of the practitioners are available almost all day and evening, Best of the facilities at 1/2 or less cost than western countries, best of the pharma’s are available without going through insurance traps and requiring Doctors prescriptions (barring life saving/threatening stuff) and no need to see Doctor for getting medicine refill.
I doubt those who can travel cannot miss it.
The doctors who are threatened will try to get something like this going to survice, but the answer is very clear. Reform the practise to suit the needs of the patients, or figure out some agenda like this to malign the better competitor.