Random fun health news of the day, item 1:
Random fun health news of the day, item 1:
Antibiotic resistant Shigella, not just for travelers, anymore. Nasty form of GI bug/food poisoning. One reason a lot of travelers bring along Ciprofloxacin. My guess is that the drug resistance has popped up because a nifty bacterial variant got a leg up on its competitors due to widespread treatment of infections with Cipro on other continents, and then the travelers who somehow think having a weird intestinal experience isn't just part of travelling and automatically start popping antibiotics rather than pepto-bismol, kaopectate, and other fun things made a small contribution. Anyway, not a good thing.
Antibiotic resistant Shigella, not just for travelers, anymore. Nasty form of GI bug/food poisoning. One reason a lot of travelers bring along Ciprofloxacin. My guess is that the drug resistance has popped up because a nifty bacterial variant got a leg up on its competitors due to widespread treatment of infections with Cipro on other continents, and then the travelers who somehow think having a weird intestinal experience isn't just part of travelling and automatically start popping antibiotics rather than pepto-bismol, kaopectate, and other fun things made a small contribution. Anyway, not a good thing.
Those travelers are extra stupid, given the number of varieties of food poisoning endotoxin-bugs that you really don't want to be dying en masse in your gut.
ReplyDeleteGiven the modern penchant for popping antibiotics like Tic Tacs, I don't get why more pharmas aren't looking for new classes of antibiotics.
ReplyDeleteTime and money is the why not. It takes a lot of time and money to develop, and they won't make back as much money as they'd want to be able to justify the years and dollars up front.
ReplyDeleteThat said, there are some new antibiotics that have been approved or are in the pipeline, some in apparently new classes of antibiotic, and some new classes of probable antibiotics that are being studied in animals. Lastly, there's this fungal compound that they discovered in Canada that seems to disable the NDM-1 resistance enzyme, but I don't think they've found somebody willing to invest in developing it as an antibiotic, yet.
[See: bedaquiline, teixobactin, dalbavancin, tedizolid, daptomycin, spectinamides, oxadiazoles, aspergillomarasmine A]