Wired is feeling… apprehensive… about the latest progress made by the “Indian superbug” gene:
This week, I’m at ICAAC (the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy), an enormous 12,000-person meeting focused on infectious diseases and the drugs to treat them, and talk of NDM-1 is everywhere.
The news is not good. This new resistance factor has been found so far in the United States, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Germany, Oman, Kenya, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. Most of the isolates, the bacterial samples in which it has been identified, are susceptible to only one or two remaining antibiotics. One was susceptible to none.
“These resistant bugs,” Dr. Patrice Nordmann, a professor of clinical microbiology at the South-Paris Medical School, said in a briefing here, “have already spread all over the world.”
Just in case you’d started to relax about that one.