Word: antibioticized
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Antibiotic-proof bacteria are spreading around the globe because of the enormous increase in tourism and business travel in recent decades. Last month a woman came to a New York City emergency room with a strain of cholera picked up in Ecuador that was impervious to a variety of antibiotics...
When a microbe replicates itself over many generations, mutations in the DNA that forms the organism's genetic blueprint can sometimes make it safe from an antibiotic. If, for example, the drug kills the bacterium by latching onto a specific molecule on its cell wall, a change in that molecule...
Overuse of antibiotics has accelerated the evolution of superbugs, and hospitals, in particular, are major breeding grounds. For decades, surgeons and internists have fought infections in some extremely ill patients with massive doses of antibiotics, and when one drug didn't work, they tried another and another. From the standpoint...
Day-care centers provide another setting that amplifies microbial mischief. & In 1989, for instance, eight children in a center near Cleveland, Ohio, came down with chronic middle-ear infections caused by the same antibiotic- resistant strain of pneumococcus. Subsequent throat swabs revealed that 50 of the 250 children enrolled at...
One reason bacteria acquire resistance to several antibiotics is that many drugs are derivative of one another. For example, when bacteria developed an enzyme to chew up penicillin, drug designers retaliated with larger antibiotic molecules that did not fit into the site that serves as that enzyme's "mouth." In...