A new superbug found in Britain is major concern | Hacker News Reader

A new superbug found in Britain is major concern

telegraph.co.uk

8 pointscwan14 comments

> 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!?

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... )

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.

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?

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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/

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?

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.

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