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The frantic international hunt triggered by the discovery of genetically mobile resistance to colistin, a last-resort antibiotic, is producing many more findings this evening. The resistance factor is showing up in more countries, but, much more important, it has combined in some bacterial samples with genes conferring resistance to other potent drugs, creating bacteria that look effectively untreatable.
These disclosures are made in letters from research groups in a number of countries that are being published by the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases at 11:30pm London time, which is 6:30pm East Coast time here in the US. They represent evidence that this drug resistance, which was driven by agricultural use of colistin during the years that human medicine did not make use of it, is an imminently serious issue for human health.
“We’re watching our demise in real time,” Lance Price, PhD, a prominent resistance microbiologist and founder of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, who not involved in any of the research, told me. “I guess this is one of the advantages of next-generation DNA sequencing, is...
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