'Superbugs' deemed urgent threats
Chicago, September 17, 2013
Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a diarrhea-causing superbug and a class of fast-growing killer bacteria dubbed a "nightmare" have been classified as urgent public health threats in the US.
According to a new report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 2 million people in the US develop serious bacterial infections that are resistant to one or more types of antibiotics each year, and at least 23,000 die from the infections.
"For organism after organism, we're seeing this steady increase in resistance rates," Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a telephone interview. "We don't have new drugs about to come out of the pipeline. If and when we get new drugs, unless we do a better job of protecting them, we'll lose those, also."
Overprescribing of antibiotics is a chief cause of antibiotic resistance, affording pathogens the opportunity to outwit the drugs used to treat them. Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed and brought to market in the past few decades, and only a few companies are working on drugs to replace them.
In addition to resistant gonorrhea, the others now seen as urgent threats, according to the first-of-its-kind report released on Monday, are C. difficile and the killer class known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE.
The report was conceived to bring together as much information as possible about drug-resistant superbugs and how to slow their spread, with a hope of preserving the remaining drugs that still work, Frieden said.
The US is not alone in raising the alarm over antibiotic drug resistance. Last March the chief medical officer for England said antibiotic resistance poses a "catastrophic health threat". That followed a report last year from the World Health Organization that found a "superbug" strain of gonorrhea had spread to several European countries.
The CDC report ranks the threat of drug-resistant superbugs into three categories - urgent, severe and concerning - based on factors such as their health and economic impacts, the total number of cases, the ease with which they are transmitted and the availability of effective antibiotics.
Among the top three threats deemed "urgent" is CRE, which Frieden last March called a "nightmare bacteria" because even the strongest antibiotics are not effective against it.
According to the report, CRE accounts for 9,300 healthcare-associated infections. The two most common types of CRE - carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella spp. and carbapenem-resistant E. coli - account for some 600 deaths each year.
"For CRE, we're seeing increases from 1 state to 38 states in the last decade," Frieden said. - Reuters
