Word: vancomycin
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...staphylococcus infection is surely the most fearsome. The stealthy bacterium snakes along intravenous lines or seeps into surgical wounds, destroying skin and bones, poisoning blood, threatening death. For years it could be stopped by penicillin. Then it slowly became resistant to one antibiotic after another until finally only one, vancomycin, remained to subdue all staph strains. Now comes word that even that microbial barrier is falling...
Last week the Centers for Disease Control reported that a man in a Michigan hospital had contracted a staph infection that even vancomycin could not stem. It was just the second report of a vancomycin-resistant staph infection. The first case occurred in Japan last year when a baby became ill after heart surgery...
...development, first reported by the Dallas Morning News, may leave doctors without an adequate way to kill the organism and could eventually lead to an unstoppable wave of deadly infections in hospitals. First discovered in Japan, the new strain showed an "intermediate" level of resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin, which has been used worldwide to fight off Staphylococcus and other stubborn types of bacteria for the past 30 years. Dr. Francisco Sapico, an infectious disease specialist at USC's Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center, told TIME Online the possibility of losing vancomycin as a weapon against Staphylococcus is cause...
...been so overprescribed and then misused by patients that they have encouraged the bugs to develop immunities. The result is infections that are nearly impossible to treat. One deadly microbe, a type of staph that often causes postsurgical infections in hospitals, can now be attacked with only one antibiotic, vancomycin...
...Hospital in Oklahoma City. There Dr. Riley and colleagues identified the cause of the girls' illness as a strain of Staphylococcus aureus (the commonest germ in wounds and boils) that resists the killing powers of penicillin and many other drugs. Fortunately, the strain was sensitive to the antibiotic vancomycin, and the girls were soon on the mend. But where had they picked up the infection...