

A new superbug found in Britain is major concern - cwan
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5978455/A-new-superbug-found-in-Britain-is-major-concern-Government-scientists.html

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christopherdone
> Doctors are urged to be vigilent for a new bug that has arriving in Britain

This has broken grammar, and they can't spell ‘vigilant’. In the _second_
paragraph. Don't the Telegraph writers use a spell checker? Well-written text
is kind of important for a bloody newspaper. I'd send an errata to the author,
but they don't provide an email address and the author's profile takes me to a
404 page. Also:

> Antibiotics are widely available to buy without prescription in India and
> Pakistan and this has meant hospital doctor there have had to resort to

 _Waves arms about._

Hello!? Writing standards!?

~~~
kierank
I expected a lot better from the Telegraph. However it seems online right now
they are more interested in chasing digg traffic with sensationalist articles
and headlines.

(see [http://econsultancy.com/blog/3801-telegraphs-social-media-
st...](http://econsultancy.com/blog/3801-telegraphs-social-media-strategy-
pulls-in-75000-visitors-a-day) )

 _Eye-catching and descriptive headlines attract clicks on Digg, and The
Telegraph has plenty of these. Some of its most popular Digg headlines are
listed here. Some are sensational too, which can help catch the eye of Digg
users. 'Fish with human faces spotted in South Korea' got 1,759 Diggs, for
instance._

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0wned
Don't waste time worrying about "super bugs". Live life to the fullest each
day, have fun and be a nice father, husband, person. Everyone's number comes
up sooner or later and the vast majority of us will fall to cancer, heart
disease, stroke, car wreck, etc. Besides, the sun will burn out some day
leaving us all doomed... there, feel better now?

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jgrahamc
<http://www.hpa.org.uk/hpr/archives/2009/news2609.htm#ndm1> for the technical
details.

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Musashi
Is this an attempt at FUD to stop people from going overseas for inexpensive
treatments? Or is my cynical conspiracy theorists hat on a little too tight...

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rsheridan6
Why would Britain want to stop people from doing that when they have
socialized medicine?

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biohacker42
Wide spread antibiotic resistance is just a matter of time. And it's not just
people not following strict instruction on how long to take antibiotics. It's
also farming.

And it's going to be a different world when antibiotics stop working. Well,
same world we had before penicillin.

~~~
rsheridan6
What's to stop us from developing new antibiotics that will be able to beat
antibiotics? It looks to me more like a never-ending arms race.

~~~
biohacker42
Good point. But I hope in the near future out ability to develop new
antibiotics speeds up. So far we've mostly borrowed pre-existing compounds
from fungi and soil bacteria.

~~~
rsheridan6
I'm way outside my area of expertise here, but I would think that as chemistry
modeling improves it would become easier to rationally modify a molecule, or
design one from scratch, that could either kill a bug or disable the beta-
lactamases, or whatever, that the bugs use to disable older antibiotics.

I don't know how far off that is now. It might even be possible now. I do know
that there aren't strong incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop
antibiotics. There's a lot more money in coming up with some new statin that
lots of people will take for 20 years than a life-saving antibiotic that will
be taken for 10 days by a smaller number of patients - especially when
hospitals practice "antimicrobial stewardship," meaning that they don't
prescribe newer, better antibiotics unless they think the old ones won't do.

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scythe
Sounds overblown. Carbapenems (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbapenem>) are
beta-lactam antibiotics that are resistant to all [previously] known beta-
lactamases. This seems to be a newer beta-lactamase, but that certainly
wouldn't confer resistance to non-beta-lactam antibiotics like
chloramphenicol.

It's a matter of serious concern like any other new antibiotic-resistant bug,
but it's by no means "resistant to all known antibiotics". In fact, MRSA was
already resistant to carbapenems, having lost all D-alanine residues in it's
cell wall. Phage therapy is also an option for bacterial infections that are
resistant to all available antibiotics, though it's not very popular in the
West (it's mostly used in Russia).

~~~
gojomo
It seems the West should pay more attention to phage therapy. Here's where I
first learned about it:

"The Soviet method for attacking infection"

<http://www.slate.com/id/2142626/>

~~~
dflock
I too have heard a bacteriophage treatment in the same terms in the past. It's
basically using viruses that prey on bacteria, as a treatment for bacterial
infection. It was fairly widely used in the soviet bloc in lieu of
antibiotics, so (presumably) has a reasonable amount of clinical use behind
it. It it, as far as I know, very effective - and doesn't have the same issues
with bacterial resistance as antibiotics, because the bacteria and viruses
evolve in parallel; essentially it's the same arms race, but instead of us
doing all the expensive development work on antibiotics for the anti-bacterial
side, we let evolution do it for us by using naturally occurring viruses
instead.

So - my question is, does anyone know why bacteriophage treatment isn't more
widespread?

~~~
HalcyonMuse
The article in the comment you replied on has a solid theory: it's hard to
patent bacteriophages in their natural state, and tailoring bacteriophages to
a specific person presents difficulties with the FDA. Therefore, obtaining
profit through these methods is difficult.

