superbugs

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How We Could Kill Superbugs Without Antibiotics

Charlie Sorrel | Co.Exist | March 1, 2016

Antibiotics will soon be useless, but U.K. scientists have come up with a new way to kill bacteria—and it's not with a drug. And perhaps the best thing about this approach is that bacteria may not be able to build resistance against it. A team from the University of East Anglia, publishing in the journal Nature, figured out that the key to destroying bacteria is understanding how they build their defensive walls. It’s like ruining an astronaut’s space suit instead of going after the astronauts inside...

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Is The US Meat Industry Pushing Us Into A ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’?

Lauren Rothman | Munchies | October 24, 2014

...Big Meat’s rampant use of antibiotics is one of the most worrying aspects of the meat industry, an issue that unites public health advocates, doctors, consumers, and others in shared concern...

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Killing Superbugs with Star-Shaped Polymers, not Antibiotics

Press Release | Bio21 Institute, The University of Melbourne | September 13, 2016

Tiny, star-shaped molecules are effective at killing bacteria that can no longer be killed by current antibiotics, new research shows. The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs). The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called ‘peptide polymers’, and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering...

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Liposomes Could be a Possible Alternative To Antibiotics

Press Release | University of Bern | November 2, 2014

Scientists from the University of Bern have developed a novel substance for the treatment of severe bacterial infections without antibiotics, which would prevent the development of antibiotic resistance...

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More And More Infections In Europe Can Evade The Most Powerful Antibiotics

Kate Kelland | Business Insider | November 17, 2014

More and more infections in Europe are proving able to evade even the most powerful, last-resort antibiotics, posing an alarming threat to patient safety in the region, health officials said on Monday...

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More Hospitals Are Ditching Antibiotics In The Meat They Serve

Eliza Barclay | NPR | January 12, 2016

Concern about the livestock industry's overuse of antibiotics has led a number of health care institutions to start choosing meat from animals raised without antibiotics whenever they can. According to Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit that's helping the health care industry on this issue, more than 400 U.S. hospitals are working toward a goal of making 20 percent of their meat purchases "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to antibiotic-free.

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New Arms Race: Science Versus Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs

Tomasz Pierscionek | RT | March 24, 2017

The death rate from bacterial infections plummeted following the discovery of penicillin. However, these microbes developed ways to resist our antibiotics. What threats do superbugs pose and what factors contribute to their emergence? The discovery and development of antibiotics saved millions of lives during the latter half of the 20th century. Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, who witnessed soldiers with infected wounds perish while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, per chance discovered a penicillin producing mold in 1928...

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New Light-Activated Nanoparticles Kill Over 90% of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Peter Dockrill | Science Alert | January 19, 2016

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing problem around the world, responsible for some 2 million infections in the US each year that lead to approximately 23,000 deaths. But a new nanoparticle treatment developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder could provide an effective means of fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria including Salmonella, E. Coli, and Staphylococcus, based on results in a laboratory environment. In testing with a lab-grown culture, the nanoparticles killed 92 percent of drug-resistant bacterial cells while leaving the other cells intact...

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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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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker | Wired | March 18, 2017

Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...

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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker | Wired | March 18, 2017

Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...

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Predicting Antibiotic Resistance

Press Release | RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center | December 17, 2014

Treating bacterial infections with antibiotics is becoming increasingly difficult as bacteria develop resistance not only to the antibiotics being used against them, but also to ones they have never encountered before. By analyzing genetic and phenotypic changes in antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli, researchers at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) in Japan have revealed a common set of features that appear to be responsible for the development of resistance to several types of antibiotics...

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Predicting Superbugs' Countermoves To New Drugs

Press Release | Duke University | January 2, 2015

Duke University researchers used software they developed to predict a constantly-evolving infectious bacterium's countermoves to one of these new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients. In a study appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team used their program to identify the genetic changes that will allow methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, to develop resistance to a class of new experimental drugs that show promise against the deadly bug.

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Promising Antibiotic Discovered In Microbial "Dark Matter"

Heidi Ledford | Scientific American | January 7, 2015

Potential drug kills pathogens such as MRSA—and was discovered by mining "unculturable" bacteria...

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