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by Scott Kaufman
October 25, 2013
from
RawStory Website
Spanish version
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In
an interview that aired on PBS�s Frontline, an
associate director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), Dr.
Arjun Srinivasan, said that,
"for a long time, there have been
newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about �The
end of antibiotics, question mark?� Well, now I would say you
can change the title to �The end of antibiotics, period.�"
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"We�re in the post-antibiotic era,"
he continued.
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"There are patients for whom we have
no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a
patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years
ago even we could have treated, but now we can�t."
As an example, Dr. Srinivasan discussed
the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or
MRSA,
which recently made
headlines when word spread that three players from the NFL�s
Tampa Bay Buccaneers were battling it.
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The options for treating it have always
been limited, but until the past decade, MRSA infections were rarely
seen outside of health-care facilities.
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But about a decade ago, Dr. Srinivasan
began to see,
"outbreaks in schools [and] health
clubs. And what most of these people were getting was something
very different from what we saw in hospitals."
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"In hospitals, when you see MRSA
infections, you oftentimes see that in patients who have a
catheter in their blood, and that creates an opportunity for
MRSA to get into their bloodstream," he continued.
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"In the community, it was causing a
very different type of infection. It was causing a lot of very,
very serious and painful infections of the skin, which was
completely different from what we would see in health care."
Because such infections can�t be treated
with conventional antibiotic therapies, doctors have begun to "reach
back into the archives" and use older antibiotics.
"We�re using a lot of
colistin," Dr. Srinivasan said.
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"And we�re using more of it every
year. It�s very toxic. We don�t like to use it. It damages the
kidneys. But we�re forced to use it in a lot of instances."
The Frontline report,
"Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria," can be viewed below:
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Hunting the 'Nightmare Bacteria'
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