Bacteria are steadily winning the war against even our strongest antibiotics, stoking fears of a future that resembles Victorian-era England in all the worst ways. A new study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine is sure to add to this existential terror: It suggests that at least some hospital-spread…
Getting a stomach bug is bad enough. But a new outbreak of salmonella bacteria spread by raw turkey that has sickened nearly 100 people across several states has an troubling wrinkle to it: The germ at fault is likely also resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Much like climate change, the growing emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial superbugs is a ticking time bomb that threatens our very way of life. It’s also a very expensive problem to tackle, and Big Pharma has struggled to find any promising solutions. On Wednesday, yet another major pharmaceutical—the…
Last month, UK health officials reported the world’s first documented case of highly drug-resistant gonorrhea. Now there are two more cases of this so-called super gonorrhea in Australia.
A dreaded superbug nightmare has become reality. A UK man is believed to have the first confirmed case of gonorrhea highly resistant to the only two front-line drugs available against it.
A class of antibiotics heralded as an essential future weapon against drug-resistant superbugs passed an important test. There’s now evidence that they can be used to treat serious infections in live animals (in vivo) without being toxic.
It’s polluted, germ-filled sludge, not sharks, that will make going to the beach more dangerous than just staying home this summer—at least according to a cleverly titled review published this week in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
When an outbreak occurs, in order to effectively figure out how to stop it, researchers typically try to figure out how it started. The answer to that question, though, can be elusive. And as so-called superbug infections have spread across the country’s hospitals, scientists and public health officials have…
In recent years, superbugs have become one of the biggest threats to modern human health. At present, the CDC estimates that some 23,000 people die every year from multidrug-resistant infections in the United States. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to global health is big enough that this year the World…
A new experiment shows that long-term exposure to microgravity affects bacteria at the genetic level—conferring reproductive advantages that persist even after the bacteria is reintroduced to unaffected colonies and normal levels of gravity here on Earth.
Over the past nine months, the number of US cases of an emerging, multi-drug resistant fungus has ballooned from 7 to more than 122. What’s more, the fungus, Candida auris, seems to be spreading, according to a field report the Centers for Disease Control released Thursday.
For the first time ever, the World Health Organization has published a list of the 12 superbugs that pose the greatest threat to human health.
When folks talk about the gene-editing tool CRISPR, they’re usually talking about CRISPR-Cas9, a combination of DNA and enzymes that together act like scissors to cut and paste genes. CRISPR-Cas9 has already been hailed a potential game changer in the fight against cancer, crop pathogens, and environmental problems.…
Fifteen years ago, US public health officials declared that infections resistant to antibiotics could become a major threat. That threat, it seems, has arrived.
On January 1, a set of long-awaited FDA rules went into effect that could mark a major shift in the agency’s approach to antibiotics for livestock animals. First, the new policies place an outright ban on the use of any antibiotics considered “medically important” to help animals gain weight. The rules also require…
The US Centers for Disease Control has released a report in which it identifies over a dozen cases of a deadly, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris. It’s the first time this super-strain has been found in the US, and disturbingly, four of the first seven patients infected with it have died.
Researchers from Australia have discovered that chemical compounds found in the milk of Tasmanian devils are capable of killing some of the most deadly bacterial infections—a surprising finding that could introduce a new class of weapons in the war against superbugs.
Earlier this month, a frightening report warned of an antibiotic-resistant superbug which might kill as many as 10 million people worldwide by 2050. Now it looks like the first case of that superbug has been documented in the US.
An 18-month review into antimicrobial resistance warns that superbugs will kill upwards of 10 million people a year by 2050, a frightening prospect that’s being described as “the antibiotic apocalypse.”
You’ll find nisin in quite a lot of your food—particularly the food that has to be shelf-stable. Some people look askance at preservatives, but not only is this one all-natural, it has just been shown to kill tumor cells and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
