| Superbugs top focus of leading microbiology meet |
| Updated on: 11 Sep 10 08:22 AM |
Serious public health risks due to a lack of new antibiotics at a time of rising antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" will be the main focus of a top microbiology conference in Boston that starts Sunday. "We are increasingly concerned about the decline in antibiotic discovery," warned Lindsay Grayson of Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, who is program chair at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) at its 50th annual conference, running from September 12-14. For Grayson, the key reason for the marked decline in discoveries "is a changing of focus of drugs companies away from antibiotics," he told AFP, saying the lack of new drugs means people are seeing more "infections that are untreatable with antibiotics because we don't have new drugs to treat them." Drug resistance in bacteria, blamed on excessive and improper use of antibiotics, is not new, and health experts warn of an increasingly dangerous environment where the problem can flourish. |
The World Health Organization (WHO) last month issued a fresh warning over the metallo-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) gene that enables some micro-organisms to be highly resistant to almost all antibiotics.
The Lancet medical journal said bacteria containing the NDM-1 gene had been found in 37 Britons who had received medical treatment in South Asia in recent months...
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