Gill Lab

via Phages: A Work in Porgress | 2013-06-11 | National Provisioner.

The Brazos County Health Department and the Texas Department of State Health Services are investigating five cases of a possibly lethal strain of E. coli found in Brazos County residents.

The health department confirms that two children, both of whom are related, are in the hospital. Sources tell us that they are in fair condition at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

Three local adults have also been confirmed to have E. coli. All cases have been confirmed within the last week by the health department, the most recent coming Monday.

Three additional local cases are also under investigation, but have yet to be confirmed.

All five confirmed cases, according to the health department, have the O157:H7 strain. The health department says it can cause kidney failure and possibly death.

Several Local E. coli Cases Investigated; Children Hospitalized – KBTX

François Jacob, left, and Jacques Monod in 1971 (NYT)

Dr. François Jacob, a French war hero whose combat wounds forced him to change his career paths from surgeon to scientist, a pursuit that led to a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his role in discovering how genes are regulated, died on April 19 in Paris. He was 92.

Dr. Jacob said he had been watching a dull movie with his wife, Lysiane, in 1958 when he began daydreaming and was struck with an idea of how genes might function. “I think I’ve just thought up something important,” he told her.

Seven years later, Dr. Jacob shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Jacques Monod and Dr. André Lwoff, his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, for their discovery that cells can switch on and switch off certain genetic information. Their work, which focused on bacteria, increased understanding of how genes could be selectively deployed by an organism. “They’re all there in the egg. But how does the egg know when to turn from one type of cell type to another?” Richard Burian, a professor emeritus of philosophy and science studies at Virginia Tech, said of the question asked by Dr. Jacob and his colleagues. “There must be some kind of signal.”

François Jacob, Geneticist Who Pointed to How Traits Are Inherited, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com

The lac operon (Wikipedia)

More than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef collected from supermarkets for testing by the federal government contained a bacteria resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report highlighting the findings.

The data, collected in 2011 by the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System — a joint program of the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — show a sizable increase in the amount of meat contaminated with antibiotic-resistant forms of bacteria, known as superbugs, like Salmonella, E. coli and Campylobacter.

The government published the findings in February, but they received scant attention until the Environmental Work Group issued its report, “Superbugs Invade American Supermarkets,” which was partly underwritten by Applegate, which sells organic and antibiotic-free “natural” meats.

Report on U.S. Meat Sounds Alarm on ‘Superbugs’ – New York Times.

Related:

The government report in question: NARMS Retail Meat Annual Report, 2011.

FDA Annual Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Food-Producing Animals in 2011.

An alternative treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections that are raising concern nationwide already exists. But there’s a big problem. The treatment is not approved for use in the United States.

And it could be a decade or more for the treatment, long used in Russia, former Soviet nations, Eastern Europe and more recently in Asian nations, before it gets regulatory approval for safety and effectiveness.

The treatment method involves bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria — that are the world’s most abundant organisms. Each phage injects DNA into a specific bacterium to replicate itself, killing the bacterium in the process.

Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounded a national alarm about “Superbugs” or CRE — carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. The “nightmare bacteria” are becoming untreatable to a point of killing one of every two patients whose infections reach the bloodstream, the CDC states.

Bacteriophages offer a way to fight resistant bacteria, but their use still awaits approval in the U.S. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

See related stories:

Intralytix develops and markets bacteriophage-based products
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Not all viruses are the bad guys – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Federal officials warned Tuesday that “nightmare bacteria” — including the deadly superbug that struck a National Institutes of Health facility two years ago — are increasingly resistant to even the strongest antibiotics, posing a growing threat to hospitals and nursing homes nationwide.

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference: “It’s not often that our scientists come to me and say we have a very serious problem and we need to sound an alarm. But that’s exactly what we are doing today.”

• CDC warns of rise in ‘nightmare bacteria’ – The Washington Post.