Rise of the Superbugs

GERMAN philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.” For centuries, man has searched for ways to obtain power beyond the mortal limits. That impulse for the ultimate however is not exclusively humans. Bugs too have it.

Last month, I hinted on the appearance of more serious drug-resistant strains of microorganisms. These are the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria.

These groups of bacteria, which scientists call the “superbugs,” pose much greater risk to public health because they have developed resistance to many antibiotics. And admittedly, according to Karthikeyan Kumarasamy of the University of Madras (UM), Department of Microbiology (Chennai, India), “there are fewer new and developmental antibiotics active against Gram-negative bacteria.” Because of that, drug development programs cannot provide us with therapeutic cover in the next 10 to 20 years.

Kumarasamy and a team of 20 other physicians from the university identified in Chennai 44 isolates of New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) enzyme that confer members of the Gram-negative bacterial group resistance to carbapenems. Carbapenems are antibiotics of last resort (called “reserve antibiotics”) against hardy infectants such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Their report came out last August in Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The team also identified 26 isolates of these superbugs in Haryana (also in India), 37 in the United Kingdom and 73 in other sites in... [Read more.]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 19 January 2011. The erroneous title All-time fat burners 2011 found in the SunStar News Exchange website and SunStar Cebu newspaper should have been Rise of the Superbugs.

Photo courtesy of The Scientific American

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