Chinese researchers have discovered a gene that makes last-resort antibiotics ineffective. Fears that treatable infections could kill again are returning.
While the fight against antibiotic resistance is being organized in France with the upcoming appointment of an interministerial delegate, fears are mounting about the nature of this scourge.
In a study published yesterday in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Chinese researchers say they have discovered a gene that makes certain antibiotics given as a last resort ineffective when other treatments have failed. With this discovery, we can imagine that infections that are now treatable could kill again.
“Extremely worrying” results
“Our results are extremely worrying”, stressed to Agence France Presse (AFP) Professor Liu Jianhua, from the Agricultural University of Canton (southern China), the main author of the study. This “resistance” gene, as the researcher calls it, has been demonstrated in Escherichia coli bacteria known as “ E. coli (Or colibacillus) found on animals and 1,300 hospital patients in southern China.
In their work, these scientists explain that these bacteria were until then sensitive to so-called “last resort” antibiotics of the polymyxin family (colistin and polymyxin). In Spain, Germany and Italy, these products are widely used in intensive care and to stop serious infections resistant to other antibiotic treatments. In China, on the other hand, the antibiotic is mainly used in veterinary medicine.
A strain capable of spreading
It was by performing routine tests on pigs that Professor Liu Jianhua and his colleagues found a strain of colistin resistant to colistin and capable of spreading to other bacteria, such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, responsible for infections. pulmonary.
The team also discovered that this resistance was explained by the presence of a new gene (“mcr-1”), capable of copying itself by invading another bacterium.
A global threat
Although currently limited to China, resistance to colistin could develop on a global scale, worry the authors of the work. Statements that immediately raised concerns among experts.
“This is a very worrying study as polymyxins are antibiotics that are often given as a last resort to treat serious infections,” Laura Piddock, professor of microbiology at the University of Birmingham, told AFP ( UK).
Also interviewed by the Agency, Professor Nigel Brown, of the British Society for Microbiology, confides: “Now that it has been shown that resistance can be transferred from one bacterium to another, another line of defense against the ‘infection is about to fall’.
Misuse of antibiotics
“Superbacteria haunt hospitals and intensive care units around the world,” added Professor Piddock, before stressing that this scourge is linked to the overconsumption and misuse of antibiotics.
Their massive use in livestock farming has also been denounced on numerous occasions in recent years, leading some countries to take measures to restrict their use.
The authors of the Chinese study, for their part, believe that resistance to colistin “probably” occurred first in animals. They are therefore calling for a “rapid reassessment” of the use of this antibiotic on farms.
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