Woman’s superbug is resisting go-to antibiotic
‘Nightmare bacteria’ found in patient with UTI
For the first time, doctors have diagnosed an American with a superbug that can’t be treated with an antibiotic of last resort, an ominous development in the battle against antibiotic resistance.
Defense Department researchers diagnosed the superbug in a 49-year-old woman at a Pennsylvania military clinic, who had symptoms of a urinary tract infection. Doctors sent her lab sample to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where researchers learned that the E. coli bacteria causing her infection were resistant to colistin, an antibiotic used when all else fails.
Colistin was approved in the 1950s but fell out of use in the 1970s because of its toxicity. It has made a comeback in recent years as bacteria have become resistant to other antibiotics.
Health officials have warned for years of the growing danger of antibiotic-resistant “nightmare bacteria.” Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics when they evolve in ways that prevent them from being killed by medications. The problem has been fueled by overuse of antibiotics, which are used not only in medicine but also food production.
One in three antibiotic prescriptions is unnecessary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last month. President Obama last year announced a plan for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria to address the problem.
“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” CDC director Thomas Frieden said. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients.”
Frieden said it was significant that the woman hadn’t traveled outside the U.S., suggesting that the resistant strain is circulating here. Similar superbugs were diagnosed in people and animals in China last year.
Although the problem is serious, the number of E. coli bacteria resistant to colistin is still relatively small in the U.S. and Europe, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Antibiotics revolutionized medicine in the mid-20th century, making surgeries safer. If infections can’t be treated by antibiotics, people could die from small wounds or minor surgery. Already, about 700,000 people a year die from resistant infections, according to the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, a project commissioned by the British government in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust. In the U.S. alone, 2 million people develop resistant infections each year and 23,000 die, according to the CDC.
Bacteria today are mutating faster than pharmaceutical companies can develop drugs to kill them. Because most people take antibiotics for a few days or a week, they aren’t very profitable, giving drug companies little incentive to invest in them.
“The major pharmaceutical companies have dropped many of their anti-infective programs over the last decade,” said Peter Hotez, director of the Sabin Vaccine Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine De- velopment in Houston. “We’re going to need new actors to take on programs of antimicrobial resistance.”
Two senators — Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Orrin Hatch, RUtah — have introduced legislation to speed up the approval of new antibiotics. It would allow the Food and Drug Administration to expedite an antibiotic’s approval for an “identifiable, limited patient population,” such as those with antibiotic-resistant infections, if the drug treats a serious or life-threatening condition and addresses an unmet need.
“We need new drugs to fight these antibiotic-resistant bacteria that pose serious and unique challenges,” Bennet said.
“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world. The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients.”
CDC director Thomas Frieden.