The associate director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan told PBS’s series Frontline that humans and livestock have been so overmedicated that bacteria have simply become resistant to the antibiotics currently on the market.
‘For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?”‘ Dr.Srinivasan said. ‘Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”’
Dr. Srinivasan said that hospitals are now having patients admitted with infections that could be easily treated with antibiotics five years ago who have no effective treatment available. He also mentioned the increase in infections among places that in the past were not common places. For example, MRSA recently broke out in the locker room of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Until about a decade ago, MRSA was mainly seen in hospitals.
The blame for the increase in antibiotic resistant bugs was attributed partially to overuse and abuse of antibiotics and drug manufacturers not creating new antibiotics because they are not a profitable line of research.
Federal authorities are spinning news reports that the flesh-eating drug Krokodil has now been found in Illinois.
The DEA is refusing to acknowledge the reports of physicians regarding the drug.
“We, the DEA, are not seeing cases of it,” DEA spokeswoman Dawn Dearden told FoxNews.com. “Nothing’s been turned into any of our labs. As far as the DEA is concerned, we have not seen any cases.”
However, Dr. Abhin Singla, the director of addiction services at Presence St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois, said that he has seen three patients this week who were using Krokodil.
“If you want to kill yourself, this is the way to do it,” Singla told the Herald-News.
A fourth patient has since been identified. Two have left the hospital against doctor’s orders. Officials at the hospital say the legs of the women are so gangrenous that it will take years of surgeries for one of them to walk again.
A fresh outbreak of viral encephalitis has broken out in India resulting the death of at least 15 children. The death toll from the disease this year in India has reached 358.
The disease usually strikes during monsoon season and children are usually the worst affected. At least 200 patients are reportedly still in government hospitals.
Doctors say that the infected children come between 10 and 12 districts and are mostly from the rural poor.
While Japanese encephalitis had been the dominant strain through 2005, doctors say an unidentified strain of the disease has been killing children over the 8 years. While the Japanese strain comes from mosquitoes, the new virus has an unknown origin.
A fifth of children who survive the disease suffer lifetime neurological weakness.
The USDA has issued a public health alert for raw chicken packed at three California based Foster Farms locations after 278 people have been sickened with salmonella. Continue reading →
A Florida man is dead after a killer bacteria swept through his body in just 28 hours. Continue reading →
Two men were arrested in Colorado in connection with a listeria outbreak that killed 33 people in 2011.
Brothers Eric and Ryan Jensen have been charged with introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce. (Adulterated food is any food that is impure, unsafe or unwholesome.) Continue reading →
A deadly amoeba that killed a 4-year-old boy last month was found in the water supply of a Louisiana parish where the boy had been visiting.
The CDC has confirmed that Naegleria fowleri was found in four different locations of the St. Bernard Parish water system. Officials say the water is safe to drink but can be a risk for infection should the water go up a person’s nose. The amoeba enters the brain through the nose. Continue reading →
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that “superbugs” are becoming a serious public health threat.
Antibiotic resistant gonorrhea, a diarrhea-causing superbug and a fast-growing killer bacteria are part of infections that hit 2 million U.S. citizens every year and kill at least 23,000. Continue reading →
Scientists have released a report claiming that two antiviral drugs can combine to protect monkeys against the deadly MERS virus and could potentially do the same for humans. Continue reading →
Doctors Without Borders is raising an alarm about an almost 100% increase in the amount of malaria cases within a region of Chad.
DWB says the number of people coming into clinics for consultations who have malaria is running around 80% when the usual number for this time of year is less than 40%. Continue reading →
