Word: vancomycin
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...resistance to commonly used drugs. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 40% of staph infections in the U.S. in 2006 were MRSA - a bug that now kills more Americans a year than AIDS. Today, the first line of treatment against MRSA is vancomycin, a formidable antibiotic that has been around since the 1950s and is otherwise typically considered a drug of last resort. In the developing world, health workers report a proliferation of XDR (extensively drug-resistant) and MDR (multidrug-resistant) tuberculosis, against which the current first-line antibiotics, rifamycins, developed...
...Pushing that envelope in internal medicine often means using drugs we used to be scared of. Vancomycin (an antibiotic) and Prilosec (an antacid) were two we ruminated over like we were deciding to drop the bomb. They barely get a second thought these days. The dreaded side-effects just aren't that common. For reasons never clear to the surgeons, new drugs catch on in waves; first it was Prozac, then Zoloft, now its Lexipro. All our patients were on Lipitor, now they're on Crestor. Treating numbers like bone density and LDL cholesterol instead of treating fractures and clogged...
...that create the problem. Staying clean and washing up is critical. And for those who do contract the new strain of the disease, the prognosis is nowhere near hopeless. The CDC recommends discontinuing the use of other antibiotics if possible and treating the infection with those antibiotics known as vancomycin or matronidazole. Constant monitoring is important, since the disease may retreat for a time and then reemerge. Like all new bugs, the super C. diff may still hold some surprises. For the moment at least, science is managing to keep pace with...
...long-term ones associated with placing tens of thousands of people on any broad-spectrum antibiotic. Overusing these drugs, physicians have long warned, will permit resistant strains to flourish. One of the scariest examples is the appearance in 1997 of a particularly potent strain of staph bacteria resistant to vancomycin, which used to be the last line of defense. It was partly to avert such a catastrophe that the CDC made its decision last week recommending the switch to doxycycline, which is seen as equally effective. "It would certainly be healthier to have a better balance of antibiotics...
...problem was, it failed to kill every single bug, and those that survived the onslaught slowly began to multiply. The result: by the 1950s most staph infections had become highly resistant to penicillin. The same fate met penicillin's successors, erythromycin and methicillin; now it appears to be vancomycin's turn...