MRSA Notes

This article is about the lack of drugs to combat the ever increasing variety of antibiotic resistant bacteria that are growing more and more popular. I often say that the problem with new antibiotics is that it is very difficult to find drugs that kill these hearty creatures without killing you, and this is basically the authors point in this article as well. From TCS Daily:

As many as two million patients nationwide contract infections in hospitals each year, and 90,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The death rate in such cases is alarmingly high not because the patients initially are gravely ill, but because hospital germs increasingly are resistant to multiple antibiotics: about 70 percent of those infections are resistant to at least one drug, so the infections are hard to treat. In many cases, we’re already out of good second- or third-line alternatives that are effective, can be administered by mouth and have few side effects, so we must resort to drugs that are inconvenient to administer or are toxic.

Be sure and read the rest of this article if antibiotic research is of interest to you. It is very well written and easy to understand for us non-scientist types.

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