Super Bugs Starting To Hit The U.S.
The American media has been very silent on the issue of what are known as “superbugs”. Superbugs are bacteria that are completely resistant to antibiotics which means medical treatment will have a limited effect on those who are infected with superbugs.
From Yahoo:
A US woman has died from an infection that was resistant to all 26 available antibiotics, health officials said this week, raising new concerns about the rise of dangerous superbugs.
The woman, who was in her 70s, died in Nevada in September, and had recently been hospitalized in India with fractured leg bones, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
The cause of death was sepsis, following infection from a rare bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which is resistant to all antibiotics available in the United States.
…Once the bacteria was identified in Nevada, the patient was isolated to prevent the infection from spreading in the hospital…
…”This is important because we are seeing increasing numbers of drug-resistant infections, and this is one of the first cases for Klebsiella where no drug options were open to the medical staff.”
…Multi-drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae has been described by the World Health Organization as “an urgent threat to human health.”
Will Kill More Than Cancer
From the BBC:
Drug resistant infections will kill an extra 10 million people a year worldwide – more than currently die from cancer – by 2050 unless action is taken, a study says.
They are currently implicated in 700,000 deaths each year.
The analysis, presented by the economist Jim O’Neill, said the costs would spiral to $100tn (£63tn).
He was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron in July to head a review of antimicrobial resistance.
Mr O’Neill told the BBC: “To put that in context, the annual GDP [gross domestic product] of the UK is about $3tn, so this would be the equivalent of around 35 years without the UK contribution to the global economy.”
The reduction in population and the impact on ill-health would reduce world economic output by between 2% and 3.5% .
In Europe and the United States, antimicrobial resistance causes at least 50,000 deaths each year, they said. And left unchecked, deaths would rise more than 10-fold by 2050.
