"Post antibiotic era" soon - US CDC

A disturbing report from the US Centre for Disease Control. This has been in the wings for a while but looks like the pace of change is increasing, regarding the amount of resistance that now exists with all of our current antibiotics. Some conditions are becoming very hard to treat, if at all. Although the main cause for concern seems to be in hospitals and nursing homes rather than the general community. It's still bad though. Last year I spent a month in hospital as well as two months on dialysis. When I was weakest I'd have been very vulnerable if I'd have caught such a thing.

So I was surprised to see antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea second on the list of dangers. That's not something you'd normally catch in a hospital is it. I don't think it's here yet in Australia, but it's certainly well on it's way. 

“If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC’s director, said in a media briefing. “And for some patients and for some microbes, we are already there.” 

The report marks the first time the agency has provided hard numbers for the incidence, deaths and cost of all the major resistant organisms. (It had previously estimated illnesses and deaths from some families of organisms or types of drug resistance, but those numbers were never gathered in one place.) It also represents the first time the CDC has ranked resistant organisms by how much and how imminent a threat they pose, using seven criteria: health impact, economic impact, how common the infection is, how easily it spreads, how much further it might spread in the next 10 years, whether there are antibiotics that still work against it, and whether things other than administering antibiotics can be done to curb its spread. 

Out of that matrix, their top three “urgent” threats: 

Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae or CRE, a set of ICU germs that are resistant to almost all antibiotics: 9,000 infections per year, 600 deaths 

Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which currently responds to only one drug: 246,000 infections per year 

Clostridium difficile, which is growing in resistance to one class of drugs, but more important, serves as a marker for the use of other antibiotics: 250,000 illnesses, 14,000 deaths. more