New antibiotics from drug companies are having a difficult time keeping up with the race as the bacteria strains, including MRSA continue to get stronger and more difficult to defeat, and the economics for the drug companies...there's more money in finding drugs that need to be taken for a lifetime rather than short term, so does this mean the focus has shifted for many? According to the article health washing your hands is still up there as far as decreasing the odds of the bacteria spreading...BD
At a busy microbiology lab in San Francisco, bad bugs are brewing inside vials of human blood, or sprouting inside petri dishes, all in preparation for a battery of tests. Top infectious disease doctors are saying that lawmakers and the public at large do not realize the grave implications of this trend. "Within just a few years, we could be seeing that most of our microorganisms are resistant to most of our antibiotics," said Dr. Jack Edwards, chief of infectious diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
By 2006, Cipro would work against only 60 percent of samples tested.
These tests will tell doctors at UCSF Medical Center which kinds of bacteria are infecting their patients, and which antibiotics have the best chance to knock those infections down. Dr. Jeff Brooks has been director of the UCSF lab for 29 years, and has watched with a mixture of fascination and dread how bacteria once tamed by antibiotics evolve rapidly into forms that practically no drug can treat.
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