We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
October 24th, 2013If you’re looking for a way to brighten up your Thursday morning, man, this aint it.
Via: NPR:
What do you mean?
A lot of Gram-negative bacteria, they come out of the box, if you will, resistant to a number of important antibiotics that we might use to treat them. We’re talking about agents with names like Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, E. coli.
These are bacteria that have historically done a very good job of very quickly developing resistance to antibiotics. They have a lot of tricks up their sleeves for developing resistance to antibiotics, so they’re a group of agents that can quickly become resistant, can pose major challenges to resistance.
And what we’ve seen over the past decade is these Gram-negative agents becoming very rapidly more and more resistant to all of the agents that we have available to treat them.
To all of the agents?
There are Gram-negative bacteria that have developed resistance to everything, for which we have no viable antibiotics left to treat them. …
So why are we so worried about these new bacteria that are Gram negatives, and what’s happened recently?
…For a long time we’ve seen Gram negatives develop resistance to antibiotics, but we had other tricks up our sleeves. We had other antibiotics that we could use.
Increasingly, though, what we’ve seen is that they’re developing resistance even to the agents that we’ve been sort of holding back and only using in the most serious infections. They were our last, best line of defense, and we now see some of these Gram-negative organisms that are resistant to even that last line of defense.
What that means is that we’ve had to actually reach back into the archives, if you will. We’ve had to dust off the shelves [and revisit] some older antibiotics that we haven’t used in many, many years. We stopped using them because they were very toxic, and as new antibiotics came about that weren’t so toxic, we of course stopped using these older antibiotics.
Like colistin?
Colistin is a great example. And now we’re back. We’re using a lot of colistin, and we’re using more of it every year. It’s very toxic. We don’t like to use it. It damages the kidneys. But we’re forced to use it in a lot of instances.
But what’s really worrisome is that now we’re seeing bacteria that are resistant even to colistin, so there are infections for which we have really nothing to offer a patient. We’re in a situation where the patient will get better or the patient won’t get better based on whatever the defenses the patient might have, but we have nothing to offer them to help them get better.
