Scientists pave way for new generation of superbug drugs

[Confounding]

This sounds very promising.

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-scientists-pave-superbug-drugs.html

Scientists at the University of East Anglia are getting closer to solving the problem of antibiotic resistance. New research published today in the journal Nature reveals the mechanism by which drug-resistant bacterial cells maintain a defensive barrier. The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill superbugs by bringing down their defensive walls rather than attacking the bacteria itself. It means that in future, bacteria may not develop drug-resistance at all.

 

[waltky]

Superbugs to 'kill every three seconds'...

Superbugs will 'kill every three seconds'
Wed, 18 May 2016 - Superbugs will kill someone every three seconds by 2050 unless the world acts now, a hugely influential report says.

The global review sets out a plan for preventing medicine "being cast back into the dark ages" that requires billions of dollars of investment. It also calls for a revolution in the way antibiotics are used and a massive campaign to educate people. The report has received a mixed response with some concerned that it does not go far enough. The battle against infections that are resistant to drugs is one the world is losing rapidly and has been described as "as big a risk as terrorism". The problem is that we are simply not developing enough new antibiotics and we are wasting the ones we have.

Since the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance started in mid-2014, more than one million people have died from such infections. And in that time doctors also discovered bacteria that can shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - leading to warnings that the world was teetering on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era". The review says the situation will get only worse with 10 million people predicted to die every year from resistant infections by 2050. And the financial cost to economies of drug resistance will add up to $100 trillion (£70 trillion) by the mid-point of the century.

The review recommends:

* An urgent and massive global awareness campaign as most people are ignorant of the risks
* Establishing a $2bn ($1.4bn) Global Innovation Fund for early stage research
* Improved access to clean water, sanitation and cleaner hospitals to prevent infections spreading
* Reduce the unnecessary vast antibiotic use in agriculture including a ban on those "highly critical" to human health
* Improved surveillance of the spread of drug resistance
* Paying companies $1bn (£0.7bn) for every new antibiotic discovered
* Financial incentives to develop new tests to prevent antibiotics being given when they will not work
* Promoting the use of vaccines and alternatives to drugs

The review said the economic case for action "was clear" and could be paid for using a small cut of the current health budgets of countries or through extra taxes on pharmaceutical companies not investing in antibiotic research. Lord Jim O'Neill, the economist who led the global review, told the BBC: "We need to inform in different ways, all over the world, why it's crucial we stop treating our antibiotics like sweets. "If we don't solve the problem we are heading to the dark ages, we will have a lot of people dying. "We have made some pretty challenging recommendations which require everybody to get out of the comfort zone, because if we don't then we aren't going to be able to solve this problem."

The Antibiotic Apocalypse

 

[SixFoot]

My grandfather was one of the guinea pigs for penicillin back in the 40's. His leg would have been lost to Jungle Rot without it.

I was one of the guinea pigs for the H1N1/09 virus in June 2009.

Perhaps our family line will carry on such traditions (without incident! lol).


In any case, aren't we supposed to be developing nano-machines that will render such archaic things as germ-culturing useless?

 

[waltky]

Mebbe Hillary been coughin' `cause she got a superbug...

Global pledge to stamp out drug-resistant infections
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 - The 193 countries of the United Nations are to sign a landmark declaration to rid the world of drug-resistant infections or superbugs.

Six years in the making, the international commitment could prevent 700,000 deaths a year, say experts. It is the fourth time a UN declaration has been reached on a health issue - following HIV in 2001, non-communicable diseases in 2011 and Ebola in 2013. The signatories now have two years to report back with an action plan.

Apocalyptic risk

Experts say treatment-resistant infections pose one of the biggest known threats to humanity today. Without urgent action, it is conceivable that simple infections could soon become entirely untreatable with existing drugs. The problem has been caused by over-use of antimicrobial medicines for humans, animals and agriculture. Repeated exposure allows bacteria and other infections, including HIV and malaria, to learn how to dodge these treatments by mutating and evolving. Unless new effective treatments are found, routine medical procedures such as hip operations and Caesarean sections could become too dangerous to perform.

The nations have committed to:

* Develop surveillance and regulatory systems on the use and sales of antimicrobial medicines for humans and animals
* Encourage innovative ways to develop new antibiotics, and improve rapid diagnostics
* Educate health professionals and the public on how to prevent drug resistant infections

The UK has been at the forefront of a campaign to get global action on superbugs. It has pledged £369m to international antimicrobial resistance (AMR) programmes in the past two years. Earlier this year, Lord O'Neill, who led a government review on AMR, called for a $2bn (£1.5bn) investment in global innovation funding for research by 2020. The signatories at the United Nations General Assembly in New York have agreed to pool funding, already totalling about $790m (£600m).

The UK's chief medical officer, Prof Dame Sally Davies, said: "Drug-resistant infections are firmly on the global agenda, but now the real work begins. "We need governments, the pharmaceutical industry, health professionals and the agricultural sector to follow through on their commitments to save modern medicine." The UK has set its own target to reduce inappropriate prescriptions and the incidence of high risk bacterial infections in hospitals by 50% by 2020 and cut the level of antibiotic use in the agricultural sector to 50mg/kg by 2020.

Global pledge to stamp out drug-resistant infections - BBC News

 

[waltky]

Toxic Indian Lake 'Superbug Hotspot' may be the result of cheap drugs...

The Cost of Cheap Drugs? Toxic Indian Lake is 'Superbug Hotspot'
September 28, 2016 — Centuries ago, Indian princes would bathe in the cool Kazhipally lake in Medak. Now, even the poorest villagers here in India's baking south point to the barren banks and frothy water and say they avoid going anywhere near it.

A short drive from the bustling tech hub of Hyderabad, Medak is the heart of India's antibiotics manufacturing business: a district of about 2.5 million that has become one of the world's largest suppliers of cheap drugs to most markets, including the United States. But community activists, researchers and some drug company employees say the presence of more than 300 drug firms, combined with lax oversight and inadequate water treatment, has left lakes and rivers laced with antibiotics, making this a giant Petri dish for anti-microbial resistance. "Resistant bacteria are breeding here and will affect the whole world," said Kishan Rao, a doctor and activist who has been working in Patancheru, a Medak industrial zone where many drug manufacturers have bases, for more than two decades. Drugmakers in Medak, including large Indian firms Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd., Aurobindo Pharma Ltd. and Hetero Drugs Ltd., and U.S. giant Mylan Inc., say they comply with local environmental rules and do not discharge effluent into waterways.

An employee works with a funnel inside a laboratory in India​

National and local government are divided on the scale of the problem. While the Central Pollution Control Board (PCB) in New Delhi categorizes Medak's Patancheru area as "critically polluted," the state PCB says its own monitoring shows the situation has improved. The rise of drug-resistant "superbugs" is a growing threat to modern medicine, with the emergence in the past year of infections resistant to even last-resort antibiotics. In the United States alone, antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause 2 million serious infections and 23,000 deaths annually, according to health officials. Thirteen leading drugmakers promised last week to clean up pollution from factories making antibiotics as part of a drive to fight the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, while United Nations member countries pledged for the first time to take steps to tackle the threat.

Major earner

Patancheru is one of the main pharmaceutical manufacturing hubs in Telangana state, where the sector accounts for around 30 percent of GDP, according to commerce ministry data. Drug exports from state capital Hyderabad are worth around $14 billion annually. Local doctor Rao pointed to studies by scientists from Sweden's University of Gothenburg that have found very high levels of pharmaceutical pollution in and around Kazhipally lake, along with the presence of antibiotic-resistant genes. The scientists have been publishing research on pollution in the area for nearly a decade. Their first study, in 2007, said antibiotic concentrations in effluent from a treatment plant used by drug factories were higher than would be expected in the blood of patients undergoing a course of treatment. That effluent was discharged into local lakes and rivers, they said. "The polluted lakes harbored considerably higher proportions of ciprofloxacin-resistant and sulfamethoxazole-resistant bacteria than did other Indian and Swedish lakes included for comparison," said their latest report, in 2015, referring to the generic names of two widely used antibiotics.

An employee carries test tubes inside a laboratory in India​

Those findings are disputed by local government officials and industry representatives. The Hyderabad-based Bulk Drug Manufacturers Association of India (BDMAI) said the state pollution control board had found no antibiotics in its own study of water in Kazhipally lake. The state PCB did not provide a copy of this report, despite several requests from Reuters. "I have not seen any credible report that says that the drugs are no longer there," Joakim Larsson, a professor of environmental pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg who led the first Swedish study and took part in the others, told Reuters by email. "There might very well have been improvements, but without data, I do not know."

Water treatment