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A Post-Antibiotic Future Is Looming

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: November 22nd, 2015, 8:00am UTC

New submitter radaos writes: A gene enabling resistance to polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort, has been found to be widespread in pigs and already present in some hospital patients. The research, from South China Agricultural University, has been published in The Lancet. According to research Jian-Hua Liu, "Our results reveal the emergence of the first polymyxin resistance gene that is readily passed between common bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Klesbsiella pneumoniae, suggesting that the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandrug resistance is inevitable." Work on alternatives is progressing mdash; Dr. Richard James, former director of the University of Nottingham's center for healthcare associated infections, writes, "Until last month I was still pessimistic about our chances of avoiding the antibiotics nightmare. But that changed when I attended a workshop in Beijing on a new approach to antibiotic development based on bacteriocins ndash; protein antibiotics produced by bacteria to kill closely related species, and exquisitely narrow-spectrum."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=A+Post-Antibiotic+Future+Is+Looming%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1HfVarB"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F11%2F22%2F0335243%2Fa-post-antibiotic-future-is-looming%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/22/0335243/a-post-antibiotic-future-is-looming?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/22/0335243/a-post-antibiotic-future-is-looming?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/U-jVEviQYAw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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