“Superbug” sounds fun and cartoonlike, but this is serious, folks. A gene that can make many types of bacteria resistant to nearly all antibiotics doctors have at their disposal is on the loose in three states.
antibiotics
A sweet solution to antibiotic-resistance?
Amid growing concerns about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a team of researchers from the Netherlands may be developing a sweet way to fend off harmful bacteria. A new study in the July issue of the FASEB Journal details their research investigating the antimicrobial properties of an ingredient in honey known as defensin-1. Researchers
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Why urinary tract infections are getting harder to treat
Increasing antibiotic resistance stemming from the use of antibiotics in raising livestock is contributing to growing difficulty in treating urinary tract infections, according to new research published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology. Dr. Pak-Leung Ho and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong say that genes which encode
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Emergence of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea
Growing resistance to two leading antibiotic treatments could make the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea more difficult to treat, according to warnings from a British health official reported by the BBC. At a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh, Dr. Catherine Ison, a gonorrhea specialist from the U.K.’s
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Should weight factor into antibiotic dosage?
Most antibiotics and antimicrobial medications are prescribed to adults based on broad dosage recommendations that do not take individual body mass into account, a system that is outdated, according to an editorial published in the current issue of the British medical journal The Lancet. Whereas children’s antibiotic dosing is generally
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Fear of lawsuits may drive doctors to overuse antibiotics
The growing number of Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in hospitals may in part be driven by physicians’ tendency to over-prescribe antibiotics to avoid being sued by disgruntled patients, according to a study published this past fall in the American Journal of Therapeutics. Researchers from New York Medical
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