corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1049

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Gottlieb S.
CDC reports first case of vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus
BMJ 2003 Apr 12
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/326/7393/783/a


Full text:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported
that in summer 2002, a 40 year old Michigan woman became the first
person worldwide known to have been infected with a strain of
Staphylococcus aureus that was resistant to the antibacterial
vancomycin
The Michigan woman developed foot ulcers and other skin infections
after becoming infected with the bacterium following an amputation.
She recovered after doctors prescribed a different course of
antibiotics. The CDC said the case highlighted the growing problem of
antibiotic resistance (New England Journal of Medicine
2003;348:1342-7).
Until recently, vancomycin was the only uniformly effective treatment
for staphylococcal infections. In 1997, the first clinical isolate of S
aureus with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin was reported, and
since June 2002, eight confirmed infections with such strains have
been reported in patients in the United States. The minimal inhibitory
concentrations of vancomycin (the amount of the antibiotic needed to
keep the bacteria from replicating) reported for these isolates are in
the intermediate range (8-16 micrograms/ml) according to criteria
defined by the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards.
Staphylococcal isolates with reduced susceptibility to glycopeptides,
such as vancomycin and teicoplanin, are a serious public health
problem because staphylococci frequently show multidrug resistance,
and glycopeptides are the only remaining effective drugs. The CDC
also confirmed that a second, unrelated vancomycin resistant
staphylococcal infection had been confirmed in Pennsylvania several
months after the Michigan case.
“Although the infection in the patient in this first case was treatable
with other antibiotics, these findings remind us of the need for
infection control and judicious use of antibiotics in the healthcare
setting to prevent antibiotic resistance,” said Dr Julie Gerberding,
director of the CDC.
Nearly all strains of S aureus in the United States are now resistant to
penicillin. Doctors embraced vancomycin in the late 1990s as
resistant forms of the bacterium spread from hospital settings into the
community.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909