A few weeks ago, the American authorities had reported the first case of infection of a patient by a bacteria resistant to all families of antibiotics. This 49-year-old patient was infected with an E.coli bacteria impermeable to all known antibiotics.
A bacteria that is resistant to colistin
American virologists have just announced that a new case of a patient infected with a multi-resistant bacteria had been found in New York. They identified the presence of a rare gene (the mrc-1 gene) that causes resistance in an E-coli bacteria. This gene is particularly feared by doctors because it makes bacteria resistant to colistin, the antibiotic of last resort in bacterial infection.
Scientists have followed the movement of this gene since its appearance in China in 2015. Found in poultry and pigs, it has subsequently spread to humans. This gene, present in a small fraction of microbial DNA, can move from bacteria to bacteria across multiple species, thereby spreading resistance to multiple species.
With a death rate of up to 50%, enterobacteriaceae resistant to last-resort antibiotics are considered by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be one of the greatest threats to public health.
According to researchers, in the United States alone, a 30% reduction in the effectiveness of antibiotics is reflected each year per 120,000 additional infections after chemotherapy and by 6,300 deaths directly linked to the bacterial infection.
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