E. coli bacteria

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A 'Slow Catastrophe' Unfolds as the Golden Age of Antibiotics Comes to an End

Melissa Healy | Los Angeles Times | July 11, 2016

In early April, experts at a military lab outside Washington intensified their search for evidence that a dangerous new biological threat had penetrated the nation’s borders. They didn’t have to hunt long before they found it. On May 18, a team working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research here had its first look at a sample of the bacterium Escherichia coli, taken from a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania. She had a urinary tract infection with a disconcerting knack for surviving the assaults of antibiotic medications. Her sample was one of six from across the country delivered to the lab of microbiologist Patrick McGann...

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A Deadly Superbug Appears to Be Invading America's Hospitals

Helen Branswell | The Week | January 23, 2017

A dangerous type of superbug has more tricks up its sleeves than we may be giving it credit for, a recent study suggests. The researchers found that this class of bacteria, CREs — that's short for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae — has more ways to evade antibiotics than have been currently identified, and that these bugs share their tricks readily across the families of bacteria that make up this grouping...

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New Study Is an Advance Toward Preventing a ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’

Press Release | UCLA | February 7, 2017
UCLA’s Elif Tekin, Casey Beppler, Pamela Yeh and Van Savage are gaining insights into why certain groups of three antibiotics interact well together and others don’t. A landmark report by the World Health Organization in 2014 observed that antibiotic resistance — long thought to be a health threat of the future — had finally become a serious threat to public health around the world. A top WHO official called for an immediate and aggressive response to prevent what he called a “post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill”...

New Superbug Resistant To All Antibiotics Now Found Worldwide

Judy Stone | Forbes | December 19, 2015

Last week, I shared scary news of a new gene called mcr-1 conferring resistance to our last-ditch antibiotic, colistin. The gene was found in China with spread to the Netherlands. I raised concerns, too, about imports of some foods from China. Several new reports in the Lancet Infectious Diseases suggest the spread of this newly found resistance gene, mcr-1, is far worse than it initially appeared. Here are the latest findings from several just-released studies...

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