Antibiotic Resistance in India

A recent news article from Times of India discusses the dire effects of antibiotic overuse on public health in India. Although we always discuss this problem in terms of what we see in the US, it’s important to realize that antibiotic resistance is a problem everywhere. According to the article, the top three antibiotic using …

Antibiotic Resistance Can Spread Through the Air

There is an abundance of literature on how microbes can obtain antibiotic resistance, but not as much about how antibiotic resistance can spread. Jonathan drew my attention to this article today, which highlights the fact that antibiotic resistance can be spread through the air. While I didn’t find the conclusions all that surprising, I was …

Antibiotic resistance genes in goat and lamb slaughterhouse surfaces

The spread of antibiotic resistance traits is an ongoing and important issue that is poorly studied. This PLoS One study by Lerma et al. is the first to use a culture independent approach to characterize antibiotic resistance traits in the total microbiota present in a goat and lamb slaughterhouse. Lerma et al. found that tetracycline resistance genes (tetA and tetB) and Sulfonamide …

Frightening Levels of Antibiotic Resistance and Capacity for Horizontal Gene Transfer Reported in a Wastewater Treatment Plant

Ah, the antibiotic resistance problem again.  Yes, we know that antibiotic overuse-both in humans and in agriculture, contributes.  This is not surprising.  But how does our built environment contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance genes?  The built environment is a perfect place for host and environmental microbes to collide and share gene, including antibiotic …

“…antibiotic resistance genes may be transported via aerosols on local scales”

In their just published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, “Tetracycline Resistance and Class 1 Integron Genes Associated with Indoor and Outdoor Aerosols,” Alison L. Ling, Norman R. Pace, Mark T. Hernandez, and Timothy M. LaPara have found that genes escape the indoor environment and can be found 2 km away. The abstract can be …

Wastewater contribues to antibiotic resistance even after the best available treatments

Wastewater treatment systems are one of the few built environments where microbes get the attention we believe they deserve.   Bacteria in particular are a critical component of treating the massive waste stream generated by humanity on a daily basis.  And those bacteria are basically harmless out in the wild… unless they harbor and transfer antibiotic …

Bedbugs are certainly unpleasant – but what should we think about reports of finding antibiotic resistance bacteria in them? #microBEnet

Some news agencies have recently been reporting that bedbugs may be doing something even more unpleasant than their normal unpleasantries.  Many news sources are reporting on recent information from a Canadian group that looked at what microbes were found in bedbugs in one area.  And what they found was pretty nasty.  Basically, the deal is …

Man-made microbial resistances in built environments

Antibiotic resistance has been assessed to rise to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally. At the same time the number of people dying from antibiotic-resistant bacteria is increasing. The World Health Organization considers the spread of antibiotic resistance and appropriate countermeasures as one …

New paper of interest on Hospital Plumbing and Carbapenem Resistance

New paper of interest:: Genomic Analysis of Hospital Plumbing Reveals Diverse Reservoir of Bacterial Plasmids Conferring Carbapenem Resistance Weingarten RA, Johnson RC, Conlan S, Ramsburg AM, Dekker JP, Lau AF, Khil P, Odom RT, Deming C, Park M, Thomas PJ, NISC Comparative Sequencing Program, Henderson DK, Palmore TN, Segre JA, Frank KM. 2018. Genomic analysis …

Has “The antibiotic course” had its day? Some say yes, some say no or not yet 

“Should we always antibiotics until the end of their course?” Well, this has been a question asked on and off over the last 10 years or so.  And this I was quite interested in a Tweet I saw from Eric Topol this AM (I note – Eric Topol on Twitter is a better source of …