super bug is threatening your

When you go into the hospital for health problem or serious injury, you expect to come out feeling
better, not sicker. Unfortunately, that's wrong for the growing number of Americans who contract
healthcare facility-related microbe infections every year. Superbugs are strains of bacteria that
are immune to several types of antibiotics. Every year these drug-resistant bacteria contaminate
more than two million people countrywide and kill at least 23,000, according to the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Drug-defiant types of tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and
staph infections are just a few of the dangers we now confront.
Normally, the bacteria that can cause infections are easily wiped out with antibiotic treatment. But
more robust strains, such as C. diff and MRSA, are becoming more widespread in medical
centers, nursing homes, and other treatment facilities. These so-called "superbacterias" are
resistant to antibiotics, making them hard to treat, chiefly in the aged.
Bacteria that fight antibiotics are widespread around the earth, concludes the first global review of
antibiotic resistance. The WHO has revealed that there is no globally standardised way to analyse
and share information on drug-resistant infections.
We should take momentous actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how
we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics. Otherwise, the world will lose more and more of these
global public health goods and the implications will be disastrous. The WHO points out that
without incentives for pharmaceutical companies to create novel antibiotics, we will run out of
ways to battle defiant infections. The data in the WHO report raise the spectre that most
antibiotics could become basically useless while we are still trying to measure the level of the
problem.
When antibiotics were first introduced in the 1950s, they were the original wonder drugs. Most
people alive today can't remember a time when common bacterial infections, a sore throat, an
attack of diarrhoea, an infected tooth, a minor cut, could be deadly. Antibiotics are among the
most commonly prescribed drugs for people. They're also given to livestock to prevent disease
and promote growth. Antibiotics are effective against bacterial infections, such as strep throat and
some types of pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, and ear infections. But these drugs don't work at all
against viruses, such as those that cause colds or flu.
Many antibiotics prescribed to people and to animals are unneeded. And the overuse and misuse
of antibiotics helps to create drug-defiant bacteria. But bacteria have increasingly more resisted
antibiotics since then. When an infection is treated, bacteria with genes that code for enzymes
that obliterate or keep out the drug survive. There may be too few of these to matter at first, but if
enough bacteria repeatedly encounter the antibiotic, the defiant ones can have enough selective
advantage to eventually dominate the population. This happens when the drugs are used too
widely or to boost growth in livestock.
Compounding the problem is the healthcare facility setting itself. In addition to being in the midst

of other ill people, patients risk contracting infections via everything from bed linens to visitors
who don't wash their hands. Invasive tools such as IVs, ventilators, and catheters, which stay in
the body for days, can make for an easy pathway into the bloodstream for bacteria.
Only 114 of its 194 countries had national data on antibiotic resistance, and there were many
gaps in that, especially in Africa, western Asia and eastern Europe. There was also no consensus
on how to measure resistance, for example how many samples of what kind needed to be tested.
Countries in all regions reported that more than half of Klebsiella infections resist antibiotics called
third-generation cephalosporins. If those medicines fail, the only ones left are a class called
carbapenems, and some countries in the European and eastern Mediterranean regions reported
more than 50 per cent of Klebsiella infections resisted those as well, making them almost
untreatable.
National authorities and researchers may see different bacterial worlds. Countries in the
European and western Pacific regions reported that a quarter or more of all Shigella dysentery
cases resisted fluoroquinolone antibiotics. Research reports found up to 82 per cent of such
infections were also defiant in South-East Asia, yet no national medical authorities in that region
made any such report.
Tackling the problem will require new antibiotics, but few are being developed, because there is
little profit in drugs that must be used briefly and sparingly. In the past we thought of antibiotics as
commercial goods to be sold. Now we have to think of them as global public goods, which are
usually supported by governments.
You can help slow the spread of drug-resistant bacteria by using antibiotics correctly and only
when needed. Don't insist on an antibiotic if your health care provider recommends otherwise. For
instance, many parents expect doctors to prescribe antibiotics for a child's ear infection. But
professionals suggest delaying for a time in certain conditions, as many ear infections get better
without antibiotics.
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