A malaria strain increasingly resistant to the most effective drug used to treat the disease has spread along the Thai-Myanmar border, a 10-year study published in The Lancet medical journal found, and may reach India and Africa unless ways are found to contain it. The findings in the U.K.-based publication released on Friday observed that patients at malaria clinics took longer to get better... (read more)
Livestock in the United States may be building resistance to deadly bacterial infections, and those superbugs may be easily transferrable to humans, according to a new study published in the journal, mBio. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to antibiotics used to treat staph infections. About two out of every 100 people carry... (read more)
Europe's health is suffering, with around 80,000 cases of tuberculosis infection a year and serious problems with measles, HIV and threats from "superbug" infections, an annual health report on the region said Thursday. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease in EU, said its 2011 report sends "worrying signals" on epidemics of measles, and... (read more)
Antibiotic resistance is a type of drug resistance where a microorganism is able to survive exposure to an antibiotic. While a spontaneous or induced genetic mutation in bacteria may confer resistance to antimicrobial drugs, genes that confer resistance can be transferred between bacteria in a horizontal fashion by conjugation, transduction, or transformation. Thus a gene for antibiotic resistance which had evolved via natural selection may be shared. Evolutionary stress such as exposure to antibiotics then selects for the antibiotic resistant trait. Many antibiotic resistance genes reside on plasmids, facilitating their transfer. If a bacterium carries several resistance genes, it is called multidrug resistant (MDR) or, informally, a superbug or super bacterium.
Genes for resistance to antibiotics, like the antibiotics themselves, are ancient. However, the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections seen in clinical practice stems from antibiotic use both within human medicine and veterinary medicine. Any use of antibiotics can increase selective pressure in a population of bacteria to allow the resistant bacteria to thrive and the susceptible bacteria to die off. As resistance towards antibiotics becomes more common, a greater need for alternative treatments arises. However, despite a push for new antibiotic therapies there has been a continued decline in the number of newly approved drugs. Antibiotic resistance therefore poses a significant problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance
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