Antibiotic Guardian

Antibiotic resistance remains one of the biggest threats facing us today. We invite the public, students and educators, farmers, the veterinary and medical communities and professional organisations, to become Antibiotic Guardians.

 Antibiotic resistance as big a threat as climate change – chief medic

Protests against climate change should be extended to the other greatest threat facing humanity, according to England’s chief medical officer, who says an Extinction Rebellion-style campaign is needed to save people from antibiotics becoming ineffective in the face of overuse and a lack of regulation. The threat of antibiotic resistance is as great as that from climate change, said Dame Sally Davies, and should be given as much attention from politicians and the public.

 Antibiotic Resistance: The Global Threat

Antibiotic resistance — when bacteria change and cause antibiotics to fail — is happening across the world. There is no system in place to track antibiotic resistance globally. According to the CDC, without urgent action, many modern medicines could become obsolete, turning even common infections into deadly threats.

 Genetically Tweaked Viruses Just Saved a Very Sick Teen

With a stroke of last-minute luck, scientists engineered bacteria-killing viruses to help an ailing girl recover from a deadly infection.

 Scientists engineer a powerful new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Meningitis, pneumonia, deadly diarrhea. Antibiotic developers have long struggled to treat such dreaded diseases because the bacteria that cause them have double cell walls with an outer membrane that is particularly difficult for drugs to penetrate. The only new products to fight such gram-negative bacteria in the past 50 years are variations on existing, already approved drugs. Yet resistance to those classes of compounds is soaring. Now, a team of scientists has created a compound that breaches these bacterial outer membranes in a novel way—and could one day save the lives of people infected with bacteria that today foil every gram-negative antibiotic on the market.

 The global threat of antibiotic resistance

Antibiotics have started to fail. Resistant bacteria already cause more than 1,27 million deaths every year. This number is predicted to rise dramatically if radical actions are not taken. Antibiotic resistance has become one of the greatest threats to global health.

 U.N. Issues Urgent Warning on the Growing Peril of Drug-Resistant Infections

A new report says the overuse of antimicrobial drugs in humans, animals and plants is fueling resistant pathogens that could kill 10 million people annually by 2050.

 Wait, There’s Hope! Here’s How Humans Might Save Antibiotics

Dozens of hospital networks, both giant and small, pledged to reduce the prescriptions they write in-house, to keep from encouraging resistance. Huge retailers committed to tracking animal antibiotic use; Walmart, for instance, agreed to set guidelines for the suppliers that funnel meat to its more than 5,000 stores. Pharmaceutical manufacturers including Merck, one of the few US-based companies still making antibiotics, laid out a plan to invest more in basic research on new compounds. Fifty-five pharma and biotech companies promised to develop better rapid tests, which prevent unnecessary prescriptions, including Accelerate Diagnostics, based in Arizona, which committed a $100 million program. Two manufacturers of veterinary vaccines announced they would educate veterinarians on alternatives to using antibiotics in farm animals.

Stop Whining About Antibiotic Abuse

We can win our battle against bacteria. Here’s how.

The Common Wisdom on Antibiotics Is Wrong

Taking your full course of antibiotics isn’t helping prevent the spread of resistance; it’s fueling it.

A Startup Takes On Antibiotic Resistance

Most of us in the developed world simply can’t imagine a life in which an endless array of infectious diseases runs unchecked, decimating life around them. We have taken this for granted because, well, we have taken antibiotics for granted. The problem is, we have used this form of chemotherapy so much (and with so little restriction) that it has led to pathogens that no longer yield to it. The reasons for this are lengthy and complex, and I won’t get into them here.

All you need to know about the 'Antibiotic Apocalypse'

The post-antibiotic era will be a frightening place to live – but there may be ways to avoid disaster.

Antibiotic Resistance Is a Public Health Nightmare — And It's Not Going to Stop

Antibiotics have saved countless lives in the 88 years since penicillin was discovered, but the antibiotics we have aren't working as well as they once did — and if we don't act, the results could be disastrous, infectious disease experts say.

Cheap White Vinegar Deserves a Health Award

It costs nothing; it kills everything.

Exactly how bad is antibiotic resistance right now?

“We are seeing an increasing number of accounts of resistance to top-shelf antibiotics (like colistin and the carbapenem class), which are our last lines of defense against these bugs,” Keeve Nachman, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said in an email. “We are also learning more and more that some of the most worrisome genes that allow bacteria to resist our most powerful antibiotics are being exchanged more readily between different types of bacteria.”

Get ready for a future where antibiotics no longer work

Some pneumonia is becoming resistant to what's usually the last line of treatment available.

Get Your Children Good and Dirty

Researchers are discovering how crucial microbes are to our health and to avoiding a range of newly common diseases. So it’s time to get dirty, eat better and stop overusing antibiotics.

How scientists are preparing for a world without antibiotics

5 strategies for beating antibiotic resistance.

The Forgotten $35 Billion U.S. Healthcare Problem

Each year, more than 23,000 people die in the United States as a direct result of bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics–the equivalent of a Boeing 747 crashing each week. And the same can be said for Europe, which estimates that 25,000 lives a year are lost to resistant bacteria.

The Plan to Avert Our Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse

A new report estimates that by 2050, drug-resistant infections will kill one person every three seconds, unless the world’s governments take drastic steps now.

The spread of superbugs

What can be done about the rising risk of antibiotic resistance?

The State of the World's Antibiotics, 2015

Latest global review on antibiotic use, resistance, and policies.

The World Is Not Prepared For Terrifying Superbugs

It’s more than resistant bacterial superbugs that should scare us. Only a few months after the Wellcome Trust's dire report on growing antibiotic resistance and the looming “post-antibiotic era,” a new report stresses that it is not just bacteria we need to worry about. Viruses and parasites are showing growing resistance to antimicrobials as well, and countries are ill-equipped to deal with this.

To fight antibiotic resistance, we need higher taxes—or fewer meat eaters

“If we keep going on like that, wasting our antibiotics on nonessential purposes, eventually nothing is going to work,” says Thomas Van Boeckel, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich, Switzerland.

A key tool in the race against drug resistance: vaccines

Drug resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health today. Vaccines can help.

How Dirt Could Save Humanity From an Infectious Apocalypse

One chemist thinks he’s found a way for us to outrun the lethal juggernaut of antibiotic resistance.

Our antibiotics are becoming useless

Already, 700,000 people around the world die of drug-resistant diseases each year, including 230,000 deaths from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Common problems like STDs and urinary tract infections are also becoming resistant to treatment. Routine hospital procedures like C-sections could become more dangerous as well as the risk associated with infection increases. Yet doctors, farmers, and others continue to dole out too many antibiotics, driving the resistance

The Hidden Link Between Farm Antibiotics and Human Illness

Now a new study, years in the making, goes further than any other to demonstrate that resistant bacteria can move from animals to humans via the meat they become. It also provides a model of how new surveillance systems might reduce that bacterial flow at its source on farms.

Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotics—medicine’s “magic bullets”—save tens of thousands of lives annually in the United States. But these magic bullets are losing their power. The problem is the ability of bacteria to resist the effects of an antibiotic—that is, to become antibiotic resistant. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria undergo a genetic change that reduces or eliminates the effectiveness of drugs or other agents designed to cure or prevent infection. Resistant bacterial infections have inevitably followed the widespread use of every new antibiotic introduced.

Antibiotic Resistance: A Crisis of Our Own Making

Antibiotics have saved untold millions of lives. But through our overuse we are reducing the number of people who can be saved by this little medical miracle.

Culture of Secrecy Shields Hospitals With Outbreaks of Drug-Resistant Infections

The lack of transparency puts patients at risk, some say. Institutions say disclosure could scare some people away from seeking needed medical care.

Five of the scariest antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the past five years

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria change in a way that prevents the antibiotic from working. Changes in bacteria, known as resistance mechanisms, come in different forms and can be shared between different bacteria, spreading the problem. Antibiotic resistance risks returning us to an age where even simple cuts and scrapes can become deadly.

Genetically Engineered Viruses Treat Antibiotic-Resistant Infection

Clinicians first started experimenting with phage therapy to treat bacterial infections as early as 1919, though it fell out of practice in the West after the widespread introduction of antibiotics. The therapy has remained in use in some countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

How can evolutionary biology help to get rid of antibiotic resistant bacteria?

Antibiotics have now saved millions of lives, but the large-scale use of antibiotics has driven the spread of resistance, as predicted by Fleming. Pathogenic bacteria have evolved resistance to all of the main classes of antibiotics and pan resistant bacteria have caused untreatable infections.

Pork farming: the next battlefield for fighting antibiotic resistance

McDonald’s recently announced it will begin phasing out the use of medically important antibiotics in its global beef supply chain, building on its experience phasing out such antibiotics from its chicken supply. Other retail food chains have also made progress. Now it’s time to take aim at pork.