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| Science & Technology |
| NV woman dies of bug resistant to every US antibiotic available |
| 2017-01-17 |
| Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics. "It was tested against everything that's available in the United States … and was not effective," said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of health care quality promotion. The woman in Nevada was cared for in isolation; the staff who treated her used infection control precautions to prevent spread of the superbug in the hospital. Chen and Randall Todd, a health department colleague, told STAT testing was done to look for additional infections, but so far none have been detected. [Dr. James] Johnson [a professor of infectious diseases medicine at the University of Minnesota and a specialist at the Minnesota VA Medical Center] said it's likely, though, that other people in the US are carrying similar bacteria in their guts and could become sick at some point. "It's possible that this is the only person in the US and she had the bad luck to go to India, pick up the bad bug, come back and here it is, we found her and now that she's dead, it's gone from the US. That is highly improbable," he said. "People have asked me many times ‘How scared should we be?' … ‘How close are we to the edge of the cliff?' And I tell them: We're already falling off the cliff," Johnson said. "It's happening. It's just happening ‐ so far ‐ on a relatively small scale and mostly far away from us. People that we don't see … so it doesn't have the same emotional impact.'' |
| Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418 |
| #1 A 70 year old who traveled to India. An incubator with an age diminished immune system. I don't know that Reno is a hotbed of infection control. I hope she had a robust pain management protocol. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-01-17 09:03 |