MRSA Infection & Symptoms

Antibiotic Overuse Campaign

Link: Infectious Diseases Experts Observe “Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work Week” Oct. 6-10.

That’s why IDSA is supporting “Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work” Week, Oct. 6-10, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to CDC, three-quarters of all antibiotics prescriptions made by office-based physicians are for upper respiratory infections: sore throats, runny noses, congestion, earaches, and the like. Unfortunately, many of these infections are caused by viruses—which means antibiotics won’t help. Even bacterial versions of these infections usually go away on their own, without antibiotics. “Not only are antibiotics of little value for most upper respiratory infections,” Poretz said, “but taking them when they are not needed—or not taking them as prescribed—can, in fact, do harm.” Using antibiotics when they are not needed increases the likelihood that they won’t work when they are needed. Inappropriate use speeds up the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a growing threat to public health. Furthermore, no drug is perfectly safe, and antibiotics are no exception. A recent CDC study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases estimates 142,000 emergency room visits a year are caused by allergic reactions to antibiotics and other adverse events.

We Are Facing A Global Pandemic Of Antibiotic Resistance, Warn Experts

Link: We Are Facing A Global Pandemic Of Antibiotic Resistance, Warn Experts.

Vital components of modern medicine such as major surgery, organ transplantation, and cancer chemotherapy will be threatened if antibiotic resistance is not tackled urgently, warn experts on bmj.com today. A concerted global response is needed to address rising rates of bacterial resistance caused by the use and abuse of antibiotics or "we will return to the pre-antibiotic era", write Professor Otto Cars and colleagues in an editorial. All antibiotic use "uses up" some of the effectiveness of that antibiotic, diminishing the ability to use it in the future, write the authors, and antibiotics can no longer be considered as a renewable source.

Antibiotic Cycling Reduces MRSA Toll

Link: Promising Method For Reducing MRSA Infections In Hospital Intensive Care Units Revealed By University Of Virginia Study.

Doctors at the University of Virginia Health System have significantly reduced MRSA infections among surgical intensive care patients by using antibiotic cycling, a method of rotating drugs at regular intervals. In a study published in the September 3, 2008 issue of Surgical Infections, UVA researchers report that switching between two antibiotics, linezolid and vancomycin, every three months in the surgical ICU decreased the MRSA infection rate from 1.9 to 1.4 patients per 100 admissions. In-hospital mortality from surgical ICU-acquired MRSA infections fell from 3.8 patients per year to none.

'Antibiotics To Cure Sick Apples, Or Sick Children?' Physicians Ask EPA

Link: 'Antibiotics To Cure Sick Apples, Or Sick Children?' Physicians Ask EPA.

A federal decision to permit the State of Michigan to spray the state's apple orchards with gentamicin risks undermining the value of this important antibiotic to treat blood infections in newborns and other serious human infections, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday granted the state of Michigan "emergency" permission to use gentamicin to fight a tree disease called fire blight. "At a time when bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to many of our best antibiotics, it is an extremely bad idea to risk undermining gentamicin's effectiveness for treating human disease by using it to treat a disease in apples," said IDSA President Donald Poretz, MD. Gentamicin is a crucial antibiotic used to treat dangerous gastrointestinal and urinary tract infections, and is particularly valuable for treating blood infections in newborn children. As rates of antibiotic-resistant infections rise across the country, effective drugs like gen

Doctors told to cut back on antibiotics - Yahoo! News UK

Link: Doctors told to cut back on antibiotics - Yahoo! News UK.

Doctors have been told not to prescribe antibiotics for coughs, colds and ear infections. (Advertisement) The drugs cost the NHS £175 million last year and the drive to cut down on their use is designed both to save money and stop the spread of superbugs like MRSA, which have become resistant to most forms of the drug. Figures show that a quarter of people in England and Wales will visit their GP every year because of symptoms of a respiratory tract infection. They account for 60 per cent of all antibiotic prescribing in general practice - a figure health experts are trying to drive down. Over-prescribing of antibiotics has been linked to the development of superbugs, which become resistant to most forms of the drug. Evidence also shows that antibiotics have limited effectiveness in treating most tract infections and complications are rare if antibiotics are withheld.

Humans May Lose Battle with Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist's Research Shows

Link: Humans May Lose Battle with Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist's Research Shows.

These days, with so-called “superbugs” like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) making news, resistance is becoming a major public health problem. “Resistance that started in a hospital setting quickly spread into the community, and now resistance is essentially all around us,” Mitscher said. “That does not mean to say we’re all going to die in agony in the immediate future. But this is an important phenomenon that needs to be addressed more carefully than we have in the past.” Part of the solution is to use antibiotics sparingly for industrial, agricultural and medical purposes. When an antibiotic is called for to treat an infection the best one should be used with appropriate intensity. Mitscher said that drug corporations must develop antibiotics with the potential not only to kill microbes but also to inhibit their ability to mutate. These new drugs would be made more effective still if they enlisted the body’s own immune system to battle infections. Alas, because of the economics of the drug industry, Mitscher said such “triple treat” antibiotics might be a long time coming. “The pace of antibiotic discovery has fallen off, partly because the intensive research on them has lead to increasingly diminishing returns,” said Mitscher. “Pharmaceutical firms have, for a variety of commercial reasons, de-emphasized antibiotic research in recent decades.”

MRSA Nasal Treatment could break resistance problem

Link: MRSA Is A Slow Moving Hurricane That Cannot Be Averted Says Infection Expert.

For those covering this news and stories on new approaches on eradicating MRSA, NovaBay Pharmaceuticals is making available Dr. Ron Najafi, CEO of NovaBay. Dr. Najafi believes the issue of MRSA is similar to a slow moving hurricane, gathering strength and resistance as it spreads. "Once the 'superbug' hits a community or hospital," asks Dr. Najafi, "are populations ready to deal with it?" That is why Dr. Najafi believes a different approach is necessary in treating the rapidly increasing infectious microbes that have become resistant to our current slate of drugs. Dr. Najafi and the research team at NovaBay are currently working on a compound, NVC-422, which has shown promise combating numerous pathogens including MRSA. NovaBay believes that the colonization of S. aureus takes place primarily in the nose and on the skin. The damp and dark qualities of nasal tissue create an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria to grow and spread. AgaNase™, NovaBay's formulation of NVC-422 for nasal applications, is unique in that it is an anti-infective, though not a conventional antibiotic. Topically applied to the lower nasal passage to eliminate colonization of S. aureus, including MRSA, AgaNase rapidly destroys a range of pathogens that include bacteria, yeast, and viruses. Because AgaNase is a chlorine-based analog of molecules produced by white blood cells, it is believed that bacteria and viruses are unlikely to develop resistance to this treatment.

Scientists identify proteins that help bacteria put up a fight

Link: Scientists identify proteins that help bacteria put up a fight.

Scientists have already observed that the cell membranes of many disease-causing bacteria develop resistance by changing their electrical charge from negative to positive. Many antibiotics work because they carry a positive charge that attracts them to negatively charged bacteria cells. The opposite charges allow antibiotics to penetrate and kill bacteria. But by changing their naturally occurring negative charge to positive, some bacteria cells establish a protective “coat” that repels the antibiotic. A common example of antibiotic resistance is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the strain of bacteria responsible for thousands of difficult-to-treat infections reported in humans each year. “There is a dispute that remains unresolved as to whether or not this pathway we’re investigating is involved in MRSA. It’s very unclear. By understanding the mechanism, we might be able to find out if this is involved in MRSA or not,” Ibba said. Ibba and Hervé Roy, a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State and lead author of the study, concentrated on exploring the activities of these specific MprF proteins, which are just two of dozens of forms of a class of genes associated with the development of resistance in about 200 bacteria species. They investigated the activity of two forms of MprF from the pathogen Clostridium perfringens, one of the most common sources of food poisoning in the United States. MprF proteins affect the membrane’s charge by using an adapter molecule, called transfer RNA (tRNA), to transfer amino acids to the lipids that make up the cell membrane. This action leads to modification of the membrane and the change in its charge.

Antibiotic policies to control hospital-acquired infection

Link: Antibiotic policies to control hospital-acquired infection -- Gould, 10.1093/jac/dkn039 -- Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Antibiotic use is widely accepted as being responsible for the selection and maintenance of antibiotic resistance. It is less obvious, however, that it is also responsible for increasing transmissibility and pathogenicity of many multiresistant bacteria and may actually be increasing the number of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Antibiotic stewardship should be given much more emphasis in the fight against HAI.

MRSA: Antibiotic Cycling Strategy will slow down resistance

Link: MRSA: Mathematical Modeling Offers New Approaches To Fight Dual-resistant Hospital Infections.

"Model simulations were used to compare the effects of antimicrobial cycling, in which antibiotic classes are alternated over time, with mixing programs (random allocation of treatment drugs) in a setting where the goal is that of reducing the prevalence of dual resistance," Castillo-Chavez says. "Resistance to multiple drugs cannot be ignored and cycling programs appear more useful in reducing dual resistance than the random mixing regime," he says. "The early diagnosis and isolation of colonized patients with dual-resistant bacteria turns out to be quite effective at maintaining lower levels of dual resistance in hospitals." He notes: "This seems to be the first time that models are used to deal with the evaluation of two distinct methods of reducing the impact of dual resistance in hospitals. Models that focus on reducing the prevalence of pathogens resistant to two types of drugs, excluding the possibility of dual resistance, have been studied in the past. Models were used to show that random allocation treatment regimes might be better than cycling. "Here, we show that cycling may be useful when dealing with dual resistance -- the most worrisome hospital situation," he says.

Antibiotic Key To Controlling MRSA Epidemic Identified

Link: Key To Controlling MRSA Epidemic Identified.

Now, a sophisticated new mathematical model has identified what may be the key to getting this growing health problem under control: Changing the way that antibiotics are prescribed and administered. "We have developed the mathematical model in order to identify the key factors that contribute to this problem and to estimate the effectiveness of different types of preventative measures in typical hospital settings," said Vanderbilt mathematician Glenn F. Webb, who described the results at a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 17 in Boston. "According to our analysis, the most effective way to combat this growing problem is to minimize the use of antibiotics," he said. "It is no secret that antibiotics are overused in hospitals. How to optimize its administration is a difficult issue. But the excessive use of antibiotics, which may benefit individual patients, is creating a serious problem for the general patient community." For example, the model calculates that in a hospital where antibiotic treatments are begun on average three days after diagnosis and continued for 18 days, the number of cross-infection by resistant bacteria (that is, cases where patients are accidentally infected by health care workers who have been exposed to these bacteria while treating other patients) waxes and wanes but never disappears completely. However, when antibiotic treatments are begun on the day of diagnosis and continued for eight days, the cross-infection rate drops to nearly zero within 250 days.

GPs urged to cut back antibiotics

Link: BBC NEWS | Health | GPs urged to cut back antibiotics.

The government said action was necessary to protect the efficacy of the drugs that people have. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections but all colds and most coughs and sore throats are caused by viruses so cannot be cured with antibiotics Sir Liam Donaldson It added that many people did not realise the reason that infections such as MRSA are hard to get rid of is because the bacteria are resistant to the main class of antibiotics used to treat them. Chief medical officer for England, Liam Donaldson said: "Antibiotic resistance is becoming more common and in recent years fewer new antibiotics have been discovered.

GPs urged to cut antibiotics to help MRSA drive

Link: Pulse - GPs urged to cut antibiotics to help MRSA drive.

GPs are being told to stop prescribing antibiotics for coughs, colds and sore throats as the Government steps up its drive on ‘hospital superbugs’. Announcing Labour’s new strategy for curbing the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, health secretary Alan Johnson called for GPs to cut back on the unnecessary prescription of penicillin and other common antibiotics. As well as costing the NHS an estimated �1.7 billion a year, the inappropriate use of antibiotics has been implicated in the developing resistance of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Antibiotics may also strip the gut flora and allow other infections like C. diff to establish themselves in immunocompromised people. Dr Mark Enright, an MRSA expert at Imperial College London said: ‘In the old days, before we had problems with resistance, people thought it really didn't matter - you could throw antibiotics at these cases and you would pick up the odd one that was treatable that way’, he said.

Filipinos at biggest risk to new infection

Link: Filipinos at biggest risk to new infection, says Hong Kong study : Health.

Filipino domestic helpers are at high risk to contracting a drug-resistant "superbug" infection, a Hong Kong Univeristy study published Sunday claimed. The study found more than half of the 64 non-Chinese cases of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococus aureus (MRSA) infections in the Hong Kong community last year were Filipino domestic helpers. MRSA is a bacterial infection which is resistant to some of the strongest antibiotics. Usually it infects wounds but can cause complications such as pneumonia or blood poisoning. Ho Pak-leung, professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, said the high infection rate among the Filipino group could be blamed on high use of antibiotics.

Antibiotic caution called for

Link: New Study Links Animal Agriculture to More Than 20% of MRSA Infections in the Netherlands.

Members of the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition (KAW), including medical, agriculture, and environmental experts, are repeating their call for Congress to compel the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine whether swine, cattle and poultry harbor MRSA in the US and could be reservoirs from which infections are making their way into the community. "Antibiotic resistance is exploding in our hospitals and communities. Medical experts point to the profligate use of antibiotics in animal feed as a significant cause, but those in charge of safeguarding our food system are mostly just whistling in the dark," said Rebecca Goldburg, Senior Scientist at Environmental Defense. The heavy use of antibiotics in industrialized livestock operations can select for resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70% of all the antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are used as feed additives for chicken, hogs, and beef cattle. Antibiotics use in pig farms in the Netherlands is believed to be facilitating the spread of MRSA there.

The wrong drugs can provoke an MRSA infection?

Link: The effect of antibiotics on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- Dancer, 10.1093/jac/dkm465 -- Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Antimicrobial drugs encourage the overgrowth of organisms resistant to the agents used. Acquisition and subsequent overgrowth of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are particularly associated with β-lactam antibiotics and quinolones. These drugs allow rapid proliferation of an organism that might have been merely colonizing the skin, leading to clinical infection, treatment difficulties and potential transmission to others. In addition, there is increasing evidence that inappropriate antibiotics not only encourage overgrowth with MRSA but may also enhance pathogenicity. Such virulence is not necessarily due to simple expansion of MRSA across skin and mucosal surfaces; there appear to be molecular changes that facilitate mechanisms such as quorum sensing, adhesion, phage mobilization, exotoxin production, intracellular persistence and biofilm formation, all of which contribute towards more severe infection. This review examines the association between MRSA and certain classes of antibiotics and explores the molecular mechanisms underlying a perceived increase in virulence following inappropriate therapy. It is possible that empirical prescribing has a significant impact on the management of MRSA infections and ultimately patient outcome. It is time to challenge the prescribers’ right to prescribe what they like, when they like, for patients at risk of MRSA.

Does antibiotic exposure increase the risk of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Link: Does antibiotic exposure increase the risk of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolation? A systematic review and meta-analysis -- Tacconelli et al., 10.1093/jac/dkm416 -- Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Results: Seventy-six studies, including a total of 24 230 patients, met the inclusion criteria. Antibiotic exposure was determined in the 126 � 184 (mean � SD) days preceding MRSA isolation. The risk of acquiring MRSA was increased by 1.8-fold [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.7–1.9; P < 0.001] in patients who had taken antibiotics. The RR for single classes of antibiotics was 3 (95% CI, 2.5–3.5) for quinolones, 2.9 (95% CI, 2.4–3.5) for glycopeptides, 2.2 (95% CI, 1.7–2.9) for cephalosporins and 1.9 (95% CI, 1.7–2.2) for other �-lactams. Significant heterogeneity was detected among studies. A regression analysis revealed that the heterogeneity was linked to the length of time in which antibiotic exposure was detected before MRSA isolation (more or less than 180 days). Conclusions: This meta-analysis shows a clear association between exposure to antibiotics and MRSA isolation. This information may be useful for researchers in designing future studies and for policy decision-making on the appropriate management of antibiotic therapies.

Antibiotic care slows resistance

Link: .

Reliable, longitudinal data on antibiotic use from an established surveillance system allows a comparison of countries and assessment of trends in Europe. Several countries have reported long term increasing or decreasing trends in outpatient antibiotic use. Interestingly, of the six countries with a decreasing trend during the study period, four had implemented a national programme to control antimicrobial resistance and to improve the rational use of antibiotics. This included media coverage, such as national public campaigns in Belgium and France, and repeated media reports in Slovenia and Sweden [6-8]. Some of these countries are already seeing a decrease in antibiotic resistance among bacteria commonly responsible for community-acquired infections [9,10]. Awareness about antimicrobial resistance should be raised in all European Union (EU) Member States, particularly in those countries with high antibiotic use and resistance. On 16 October 2007, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) will organise a debate at the European Parliament on the role of the EU on these issues. In 2008, ECDC will organise the first European Antibiotic Resistance Day to promote and coordinate initiatives to raise public awareness on antimicrobial resistance and appropriate use of antibiotics in the EU.

New understanding coukld mean more potent antibiotics

Link: Deciphering Mechanism

In the battle against bacteria, researchers have scored a direct hit. They have made a discovery that could shorten the road to new and more potent antibiotics. The rapid development of bacterial resistance to conventional antibiotics (such as penicillin or vancomycin) has become a major public health concern. Because resistant strains of bacteria can arise faster than drug companies can create antibiotics, understanding how these molecules function could help companies narrow their focus on potential antibiotics and bring them to market sooner. As reported in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and posted on its Web site, researchers have now deciphered the molecular mechanism behind selective antimicrobial activity for a prototypical class of synthetic compounds.

Antibiotic overuse highlighted

Link: Antibiotics? Might as well suck a sweet - Health, Frontpage - Independent.ie.

Overuse of antibiotics means we are weakening their ability to withstand serious infections like MRSA. The report, from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), shows that use of antibiotics in people treated on an out-patient basis, including GP surgeries, is on the rise. The rate of use of the drugs has climbed from 16.1pc in 1993 to 21.1pc in 2006. Inevitably, our usage rises by 27pc during the winter months, and last year we spent as much as €55m on the tablets. The use is lowest in the Netherlands where, interestingly, MRSA infection is also much lower. Our usage is closer to that of Portugal and Italy, which have more problems with superbugs. We are consuming more penicillins in contrast to many other European countries, where figures show usage is on the decline.