Stopping “Superbugs” In Their Tracks

 

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Stopping “Superbugs” In Their Tracks.

From the 22 November Medicine News Today article

University of Virginia Health System researchers are the first in the world to develop a new and faster method to track major infection-causing “superbugs” a major key in preventing the spread of deadly infections.

Their research, published in the November/December 2011 issue of the online journal mBio, comes at a critical time.

Several newly discovered genes such as KPC (Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase) and NDM (New Delhi metallo-betalactamase) have experts on alert for several reasons:

— their ability to easily transform bacteria into antibiotic-resistant superbugs

— their unprecedented ability to cross over into different strains and species of bacteria

— the ease with which they can transfer to highly infectious bacteria, such as Salmonella andcholera and

— the potential for these genes to easily establish themselves undetected in our environment.

“When you’re in a race against time to halt the spread of these life-threatening infections, the traditional methods of detection and tracking are very difficult and frankly take too long,” says UVA Medical Center Epidemiologist Costi Sifri, MD, study principal investigator.

Decoding deadly hospital-acquired infections

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