Tag Archives: antimicrobial resistance

#TOTW from 01-09-15 ‘New antibiotic could transform Cdiff treatment’

Ciao!

A little later than usual due to me being on leave and doing other things!

Another brief, but extremely worthwhile of the extra coverage #TOTW:

New antibiotic could transform treatment

A report from BBC Scotland’s Ken MacDonald in which, “Scientists at Strathclyde University, who developed the antibiotic, say it is the first of a new class of drug that could transform the treatment of potentially fatal diseases.”

Not only is this a good news story in relation to C.Diff, but it is also great in terms of the discovery of a new class of antibiotic – not something that happens often.

This is definitely something to be celebrated!

That is all!

Ben 🙂

#TOTW (from: 08-01-15) ‘Antibiotics: US discovery labelled ‘game-changer’ for medicine’

For this week’s #TOTW I turn to a subject that i’ve mentioned many times in tweets and retweets, namely that of antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance:

: US discovery labelled ‘game-changer’ for

The most promising of a number of possible new antibiotics discovered is that called teixobactin. These new antibiotics have been produced in a so-called “subterranean hotel,” and “could be a game-changer,’ states Professor Laura Piddock from the University of Birmingham.

According to analysis by James Gallagher, the health editor for BBC News website, “It works on only Gram-positive bacteria; this includes MRSA and mycobacterium tuberculosis. It cannot penetrate the extra layer of protection in Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli.”

Even given the possible limitations of teixobactin, and the fact that human trials have still to take place, the fact that there is the very possibility of a new class of antibiotics has to be exciting news, given the current “crisis” of antimicrobial resistance due to the over-prescription of many antibiotics.

Check out the link for some interesting graphics and information on the timeline of antibiotic discoveries!

#TOTW (from 17-08-14): ‘Extreme medicine: The search for new antibiotics’

This week I return to the topic of antibiotics, and as such my #TOTW is:

Extreme medicine: The search for new antibiotics

Barely a week goes by without a story that talks about the issues relating to the ever-increasing problems that result from antimicrobial resistance. I happened across this article, and thought it quite interesting. Scientists from the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich are focussing their research on nature in the hope of making discoveries that may lead to the creation of “superbug-killing drugs.”

“Natural products fell out of favor in the pharmaceutical sphere, but now is the time to look again,” says Mervyn Bibb, a professor of molecular microbiology at JIC who collaborates with many other geneticists and chemists. “We need to think ecologically, which traditionally people haven’t been doing.”

The importance of this search is highlighted by another of my tweets this week:

Article about and the increasing problems of

Here the President of the Intensive Care Society, Professor Mark Bellamy, was talking about the problems of not having enough effective antibiotics and the increasing numbers of patients dying from sepsis as a result. He is based at the Leeds Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, and said: “For the first time this year I have had a couple patients for whom we had no effective antibiotic treatment, it’s rare – but two years ago it would still have been regarded as a theoretical problem.”

I think that the general public for the most part don’t really know about the problem of antimicrobial resistance, but feel that in the coming decades, unless the search for new drugs continues – and is successful – then modern medicine will not have all the answers that we have come to expect from it, and who knows what the consequences of that will be.