Word: bacteria
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 70% of the bacteria that cause infections in hospitals are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which causes boils or pimples on the skin, is only the latest superbug to make the rounds and has appeared in dozens of high school and college athletic locker rooms, as well as in three NFL locker rooms. Drug-resistant tuberculosis cases, including those of the variety affecting Speaker, have risen along with peaks in AIDS cases, as people with weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable to infection...
...only way to thwart the bacteria, say public-health officials, is to curb the use of antibiotics. That's not likely to happen, with antibacterial hand sanitizers now in handy pocket packs and few folks willing to tough out a throat or ear infection without pharmaceutical help. The more the bugs come into contact with such agents, the faster bacteria find ways to mutate around them...
...that points to a fundamental weakness of current antibiotics. All exploit the fact that the best agents to kill bacteria come from other bacteria. Each species makes toxins that can either kill other species or arrest their growth, and existing antibiotics are modified versions of these natural defenses. But that is just the kind of biological arms race that microbes and other living things excel at adapting to. So researchers working on the next generation of antibiotics are taking advantage of new knowledge about bacterial genetics and a better understanding of the resistance process to stay one step ahead...
...this is to confuse the bacteria, hitting them with not just one natural toxin but two. At Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass., scientists are developing a new class of antibiotics that targets a pair of enzymes the microbes depend on to copy their genes and reproduce. Adapting in two directions at once slows down the bacteria enough to give the drug time to work. "Mathematically, it becomes much harder for the bacteria to develop resistance to different targets at the same time," says Dr. John Alam, the company's chief medical officer...
Another strategy is to ambush the bacteria with an unlikely ally: viruses. Vincent Fischetti at Rockefeller University is enlisting the help of bacteriophages, viruses that infect only bacterial cells, leaving human ones alone. They hijack the bacterium's genetic machinery and within minutes start to pump out hundreds of copies of themselves. When enough progeny build up inside the cell, the phages produce an enzyme that chews through the cell wall, causing it to explode with the force of a popping champagne cork and spew out the viral intruders...