Drug Resistant Bacteria

Experts concerned about depleting antibiotic arsenal in fight against drug-resistant bacteria.
The Chicago Tribune (8/6, Tsouderos) reported that "bacteria are finding ways to evade, one by one, the drugs in our arsenal, and that arsenal is not being replenished with new antibiotics." Drug "companies are abandoning the antibacterial business, citing high development costs, low return on investment," and, "increasingly, a nearly decade-long stalemate" with the FDA "over how to bring new antibiotics to market." At "the core of the problem is a regulatory impasse over whether drug companies seeking FDA approval for antibiotics" should be "required to run much more stringent clinical" trials. "We don't want to approve products that don't work," Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, told "physicians and scientists gathered for a workshop on antibiotics and clinical trials in late July."
Drug-resistant superbugs joining flesh-eating bacteria list. The AP (8/9, Marchione), detailing a nurse's five-year battle with "flesh-eating bacteria," reports that "in all of medicine, few infections are as feared" as necrotizing fasciitis. It "strikes out of the blue, especially obese people, diabetics, cancer patients, transplant recipients, and others with weak immune systems -- a growing group of Americans." It "kills 20 percent of its victims and horribly disfigures others." Earlier, "it used to be caused almost exclusively by one type of strep bacteria," but "now there's a scary trend: drug-resistant superbugs like the staph germ MRSA increasingly are able to make 'flesh-eating' toxins and cause nightmarish infections."