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Recent Posts
- In which I start updating this website again November 18, 2022
- This Week in Virology #502: Texas road phage July 17, 2018
- Novartis joins the Big Pharma exodus out of antibiotics | Endpoints News July 12, 2018
- Turning A Phage | IPATH at UC San Diego June 22, 2018
- Fighting Infection with Phages | NIH June 20, 2018
- Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day | NYT April 15, 2018
- Superbugs Are Nearly Impossible to Fight. This Last-Resort Medical Treatment Offers Hope | Time Magazine January 8, 2018
- This man should have died, but unusual infusions saved his life – The Washington Post October 24, 2017
- Sewage Saved This Man’s Life. Someday It Could Save Yours. | HuffPost October 24, 2017
- Viral Soldiers | The Scientist Magazine January 13, 2016
Category Archives: In the literature
‘Swine farmers likely to carry drug-resistant staph’ | Pig Progress
Swine farmers are more likely to carry multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus or “staph”) than people without current swine exposure, according to a study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Iowa, Kent State University, and the National Cancer Institute in the US. Link to the study’s citation in PubMed
PigProgress – MRSA in Danish pigs – what can we learn?
EFSA (European Food Safety Authority – 2009) published a report on a Baseline Survey of the prevalence of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in the EU, for 2008, in breeding holdings (producers of breeding stock) and production herds (producing weaners, growers and finishers) and found that in the Netherlands, the country that first recognised the problem in 2005, had a prevalence of 12.8% and 17.9%, respectively of the pig adapted clone of MRSA CC398. Spain had a high 46% and 50.2% prevalence, respectively, but Denmark had only 0% and… Read More →
Global antibiotic consumption 2000 to 2010: an analysis of national pharmaceutical sales data | The Lancet Infectious Diseases
The rise of antibiotic consumption and the increase in use of last-resort antibiotic drugs raises serious concerns for public health. Appropriate use of antibiotics in developing countries should be encouraged. However, to prevent a striking rise in resistance in low-income and middle-income countries with large populations and to preserve antibiotic efficacy worldwide, programmes that promote rational use through coordinated efforts by the international community should be a priority. Link: Global antibiotic consumption 2000 to 2010: an analysis of national pharmaceutical sales data | The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Humans and Companion Animals Harbor the Same Types of MRSA Infections
A shared population of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria circulates both in humans and companion animals, according to a study published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. “Our study demonstrates that humans and companion animals readily exchange and share MRSA bacteria from the same population,” says senior author Mark Holmes, senior lecturer in preventive veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge in England. MRSA naturally lives on the skin and also causes difficult-to-treat infections in humans and animals. “It… Read More →
MRSA: Farming up trouble – Nature News & Comment
The sight of just one boot coming through the doorway cues the clatter of tiny hoofs as 500 piglets scramble away from Mike Male. “That’s the sound of healthy pigs,” shouts Male, a veterinarian who has been working on pig farms for more than 30 years. On a hot June afternoon, he walks down the central aisle of a nursery in eastern Iowa, scoops up a piglet and dangles her by her hind legs. A newborn piglet’s navel is an easy entry point for bacterial infections, he explains…. Read More →
Sources of Antimicrobial Resistance: Are Animals a Major Reservoir of Resistance in Humans?
The global epidemic of multidrug-resistant Salmonella Typhimurium DT104 provides an important example, both in terms of the agent and its resistance, of a widely disseminated zoonotic pathogen. Here, with an unprecedented national collection of isolates collected contemporaneously from humans and animals and including a sample of internationally derived isolates, we have used whole-genome sequencing to dissect the phylogenetic associations of the bacterium and its antimicrobial resistance genes through the course of an epidemic. Contrary to current tenets supporting a single homogeneous epidemic, we demonstrate that the bacterium and… Read More →
A phage that carries its own CRISPR element
Bacteriophages (or phages) are the most abundant biological entities on earth, and are estimated to outnumber their bacterial prey by tenfold. The constant threat of phage predation has led to the evolution of a broad range of bacterial immunity mechanisms that in turn result in the evolution of diverse phage immune evasion strategies, leading to a dynamic co-evolutionary arms race. Although bacterial innate immune mechanisms against phage abound, the only documented bacterial adaptive immune system is the CRISPR/Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated proteins) system, which provides… Read More →