Antibiotics

Over the past decade, the problem of deadly, drug-resistant superbugs has become a global crisis, outpacing new countermeasures and threatening to bring patient care back to beginning of the 20th century. These bugs are now responsible for 23,000 deaths and 2 million illnesses a year in the United States alone...

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In a major report today that looked at antibiotic usage, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said some clinicians in similar hospital units prescribe triple the amounts, with some making the types of errors that fuel drug-resistance problems that put many more patients at risk. Read More »

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just published a first-of-its-kind assessment of the threat the country faces from antibiotic-resistant organisms, ranking them by the number of illnesses and deaths they cause each year and outlining urgent steps that need to be taken to roll back the trend. Read More »

[...] In an analysis of several sets of hospital data, gathered by the agency and also purchased from independent databases, the CDC said it found that more than 37 percent of prescriptions written in hospitals involved some sort of error or poor practice, increasing the risk of serious infections or antibiotic resistance. Read More »

Today, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (NY-25), the only microbiologist in Congress, reacted to a new study that conclusively identified transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from livestock to humans. Currently, MRSA kills more Americans each year than HIV/AIDS. Read More »

Women over 45 do not need a blood test to diagnose the menopause and X-rays are no real help to those with lower back pain, doctors have said. The advice, drawn up by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, features on a list of 40 treatments that bring little or no benefit to patients. The list is part of a campaign to reduce the number of unnecessary medical treatments. Patients are also encouraged to ask more questions about procedures. Medical experts from 11 different specialties were asked to identify five treatments or procedures commonly used in their field that were not always necessary or valuable...

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Major U.S. poultry firms are administering antibiotics to their flocks far more pervasively than regulators realize, posing a potential risk to human health.  Internal records examined by Reuters reveal that some of the nation’s largest poultry producers routinely feed chickens an array of antibiotics – not just when sickness strikes, but as a standard practice over most of the birds’ lives...

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