Terrible news. Just terrible. Urgent issue (antibiotic resistant bacteria hits USA!)

I would suggest some perspective on the whole issue. For 200,000 years humans fought back against infections without any effective treatments. We seemed to have made it through in one piece.I have personally worked with antibiotics that are still very effective against MRSA, and other pathogens such as Group A Strep (i.e. flesh eating bacteria) are still very sensitive to most of the classic antibiotics in almost all cases (e.g. penicillin, clindamycin). In fact, I will be at a massive conference next week on these very topics, so maybe I can bring back some updates for you.I'm not saying that we shouldn't worry about antibiotic resistance in common human pathogens, but it isn't the Apocalypse either.

Got back from the conference yesterday and not a whole lot to report. Most of my time was spent on lectures and posters on other subjects, but I really didn't see anything on a superbug that was resistant to all known antibiotics. What I did see was tons of posters on new antibiotics that were active against bugs that had gained resistance to other antibiotics.In other news, I attended an interesting symposium on the coevolution of microbiomes and their hosts. As it turns out, the phylogeny of gut bacteria follows the phylogeny of their hosts, especially when there is enough evolutionary distance between species to produce a strong phylogenetic signal. On top of that, transferring the gut bacteria from one species into another can cause disease or developmental issues, at least in the insect gut models that were presented.

Since they tend to be about the same size that isn't what usually happens. Instead, bacteria can release what are called bacteriocins which can cause surrounding bacteria to die and then break apart. The bacteria then soak up the resulting detritus. That is also a very interesting lecture that I attended. As it turns out, vaginal and caesarean birth can have a big impact on the baby's gut flora. It does appear that vaginal birth allows the mother to seed the baby's gut flora. A caesarean birth results in a gut flora that has different ratios of standard bacterial groups which begins to resemble baby's from natural births after about a year. I remember something about that, but it is a bit murkier. I think it has something to do with "training" T-cells, if my faulty memory is correct. There were posters and talks on phage, but I didn't attend any of those. I don't remember anything on mouthwash.

This is true in some cases. In other cases, it is disease-causing bacteria that kill off the host flora and cause an infection. In other cases, the host flora just outcompetes any disease-causing bacteria or bacteria from other sources.This is also why people can come down with serious infections after taking antibiotics, which happens to be research I am very familiar with. One of the prime examples is Clostridium difficile colitis which often occurs after a patient takes antibiotics and wipes out their normal flora. C. diff moves in and produces a serious and sometimes chronic and recurring infection. A lot of effort is being put into finding antibiotics that do a better job of preserving a patient's normal flora to prevent these types of opportunistic infections. Evolution in the host can cause the bacteria's environment to change, and the bacteria evolve to that new environment. This process can also occur in the other direction. This process is broadly termed "co-evolution".One of the interesting presentations I saw was how this type of co-evolution can aid in speciation. They cross bred two wasp species and saw that the hybrid larvae were not as viable as the larvae from intraspecies breeding. What they found is that the gut flora inherited from the mother was not compatible with the hybrid larvae and caused them to be less fit than larvae from intraspecies breeding. Their gut flora had evolved with each species to the point that they were not as compatible with the other species.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

The transfer of maternal flora to child is usually considered a good thing. I am not up on all of the literature in that specific field, so I can't confidently answer that question. However, research presented at meetings is usually the latest and newest stuff, so I can pass that on with hopes that it can answer your question.In the previous study I talked about dealing with the natural v. caesarean births, part of that study was comparing the bacterial genomes found in the mother and child. They were able to track specific lineages of bacteria by measuring single nucleotide polymorphisms (i.e. SNP, or "snips"). Using this information they were able to demonstrate the age at which mother's flora appeared in the baby's gut. With caesarean delivery the mother's flora began appearing at about 1 year, but with natural child birth the mother's flora appeared right after birth.This type of specific DNA information is probably the latest development in this type of research. They are able to screen vast amounts DNA and RNA to characterize and track complex communities of bacteria. A good analogy is the advancement of CPU speeds over the last 30 years. The ability to produce genetic data has somewhat followed Moore's law. It took a decade to sequence the first human genome, but now a single human genome can be sequenced in a matter of weeks (although with somewhat less coverage and accuracy compared to the human genome project). To use the computer analogy again, they have faster computers, and they have learned how to make multiple faster computers work in parallel with each other.

The bad news is that new antibiotics are about $2-3k for a full round, at least here in the US.