[Infowarrior] - Superbugs

[Richard Forno]

Superbugs
The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to  
treat.
by Jerome Groopman August 11, 2008


In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at  
New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from  
the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in  
charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital,  
and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella  
pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally  
resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee  
recalled recently. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called  
colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely  
abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the  
kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to  
myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’ ”

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/11/080811fa_fact_groopman?printable=true