TROOPS BRINGING HOME DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA FROM IRAQ AND

AFGHANISTAN -- MOST ANTIBIOTICS NOT ABLE TO DEAL WITH INFECTIONS

The latest edition of U.S. News & World Report has a long and interesting article about drug-resistant bacteria. 

Basically, we have been over-using antibiotics and now bacteria are mutating so that the antibiotics are no longer effective.

Story here... http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/060109/9resist.htm

Quote of note:  Until about 25 years ago, most disease-causing germs stood little chance against the stream of antibiotics that had emerged from laboratories during the 1940s and '50s. Top researchers at large pharmaceutical companies truly believed that the days of infectious disease were over.

But the flow of unique new classes of antibiotics ebbed and died in the 1960s. Resistant strains of microbes that had crumbled obediently at the touch of drugs like vancomycin appeared. Now some 2 million hospital patients a year get bacterial infections; about 90,000 of them die. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases estimates that more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause these infections are resistant to one or more antibiotics. That complicates care, inflating the cost of treating an infected patient. And so reports such as these are piling up:

Of special note is one paragraph that tells of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who are bringing home a particularly virulent strain of bacteria.

Another quote of note:  Military service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly are coming home with Acinetobacter baumannii, a potent microbe that causes pneumonia and blood infections, in their wounds. Plucked straight from soil or water, the bug is naturally resistant, often to multiple antibiotics. Sometimes physicians have to turn to coliston, a drug rarely used since the 1960s because of the high chance of injuring the kidneys and nervous system.

Larry Scott

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