Photo: Naoki Takano via Flickr
If you are looking for an undercovered story during this pandemic, take a look at the continued threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
There isn’t a lot of data out there, but scientists are watching for signs that COVID-19 patients are being overtreated with antibiotics, which could lead to a surge in super bugs – the term for bacteria and fungus that are resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics.
Photo: Phalinn Ooi via Flickr
For three years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have penalized hospitals when the institutions show unacceptably high rates of potentially avoidable complications, such as blood clots, bed sores, and infections, Jordan Rau reported last month for Kaiser Health News.
The federal agency this year added penalties for two hospital-acquired infections that result from germs resistant to antibiotics: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (known as MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff). Continue reading
Image via CDC
The latest news about the arrival in the U.S. of a deeply concerning “superbug” justifiably injected alarm into the headlines recently.
It was not actually a new bacteria that arrived but the “dreaded gene mcr-1,” a mutation which “confers protection against colistin, the last remaining antibiotic that works against a broad family of bacteria that have already acquired resistance to all the other antibiotics used against them,” as AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna described in her piece at her Germination blog at National Geographic. Continue reading
