MRSA, Staph, Staff, Mersa, Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus Symptoms & Treatment

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.