“Superbugs” are antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. These superbugs are fairly new to the medical world – it is only within the last few decades that the real dangers of these bugs have become apparent. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), these multiple-drug resistant bacteria have infected two million nationwide and killed about 23,000. Drug-resistant gonorrhea, tuberculosis and staph infections now exist.
“Bacterial infections that were treatable for decades are no longer responding to antibiotics, even the newer ones,” says Dr. Dennis Dixon, a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) expert in bacterial and fungal diseases. Scientists are trying to get ahead of the ever-growing list of antibiotic-resistant strains but new discoveries are hard to come by.
This resistance to antibiotics by these bacterial strains starts with the overuse of antibiotics in our everyday lives. Antibiotics are the most commonly prescribed drug by physicians. The bugs come in contact with an antibiotic and develop a resistance to it if they are not killed off by it. Thus, a superbug is born.
They can also multiply with this resistance and pass this trait on to the next generations of bacteria. They can also share some of these traits with different bacteria, passing on their antibiotic resistance.
Part of the fault in the overuse of antibiotics is our expectation of drug prescriptions every time we go to the doctor’s for an illness. But if you have the simple flu or cold, antibiotics will do nothing to further along your recovery.
If you are prescribed antibiotics, try and ensure that the drugs are really going to make a difference in your illness, that your sickness is bacterial in nature and not viral. Make sure you take them properly, following the directions to the letter and finish the whole course of meds. This will ensure that the maximum number of bad bacteria have been eliminated and hopefully, that no antibiotic-resistance bugs have survived.
“We need to make the best use of the drugs we have, as there aren’t many in the antibiotic development pipeline,” says Dr. Jane Knisely, who oversees studies of drug-resistant bacteria at NIH. “It’s important to understand the best way to use these drugs to increase their effectiveness and decrease the chances of resistance to emerge.”
MRSA
In the near past, hospitals were about the only place you would acquire superbugs. These tended to hit hospital patients because of their weakened immune systems and illnesses. Recently, there have been cases of some superbug strains found outside of hospital settings. It seems that even healthy people in the community can be infected.
MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It causes nasty skin infections, pneumonia, or serious bloodstream infections. The skin infection involves one or more boils or pimples that are painful and hot to the touch and swollen.
MRSA can spread through the tiniest break in the skin that has contact with the super bacteria. The CDC estimates 80,000 cases of MRSA infections in this country and 11,000 MRSA-related deaths annually. And in recent years, there has been one superbug discovered that is resistant to the antibiotic of last choice. Scary stuff.
The World Health Organization calls antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria “the greatest threats facing human health.”
Agricultural Use of Antibiotics
It is estimated that about two-thirds of the misuse of antibiotics is in the agricultural sector. The use of antibiotics is for the prevention of illness and to promote growth in chickens and livestock. And that is a straight shot to the dining room table. There is more and more concern about the Salmanella and the Campylobacter bacteria as foodborne diseases.
There are 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses a year in the U.S., with 5,000 deaths from bacterial and viral pathogens. The CDC has determined that antimicrobial use in food animals created the dominant source of antibacterial resistance in the food supply.
The use of antibiotics in industrial farm operations wouldn’t be necessary if those operations changed the way the livestock or chickens were kept. Antibiotics are used, not for sick animals, but in crowded and unsanitary conditions to keep disease down and weight gain up.
For two decades, researchers have been sounding the alarm that there is a connection between the use of antibiotics in food animals and the loss of use of some of these drugs in human medicine. There have been numerous studies supporting this thought.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wrote in 2012, “In regard to antimicrobial drug use in animals, the Agency considers the most significant risk to the public health associated with antimicrobial resistance to be human exposure to food containing antimicrobial-resistant bacteria resulting from the exposure of food-producing animals to antimicrobials.”
So why not regulate antibiotics out of the feed of livestock and chickens? Politics. The agricultural industry in the U.S. is a multi-billion dollar endeavor with many highly paid representatives in Washington lobbying for the status quo.
The Good News
But it’s not all bad regarding antibiotics. Researchers from the Northeastern University in Boston revealed their surprising findings in the journal Nature. According to the study, most of the antibiotics in use today, 99 percent, come from soil microbes. Penicillin originates in a soil fungus. The problem scientists ran across is that the conditions necessary to sustain a colony of soil microbes are nigh on impossible to sustain in the lab.
But one new technique has been successful. The researchers were able to duplicate the important environmental factors allowing the growth of microbes, enough to be studied in the lab. Definitely a very important breakthrough.
Of 25 discovered potential antibiotics, one, teixobactin, has been isolated as having a great potential for a new class of bacteria hunters. Teixobactin was found to kill a wide range of bacteria, including the antibiotic-resistant MRSA and another resistant illness, VRA.
How it works is that teixobactin breaks down the toxin’s cell wall, the first defense of any organism to any threat. This makes the bacteria vulnerable to this antibiotic because the cell wall is its “Achilles heel” as one researcher noted.
And continuing lab tests on generations of these antibiotics against common bacterial infections show that the bacteria do not mutate, so no new superbugs. At least that’s what the preliminary data indicates.
"The properties of this compound suggest a path towards developing antibiotics that are likely to avoid development of resistance," wrote researchers. Very hopeful, indeed.