medicalcondition:infections

Les antibiotiques polluent désormais les rivières du monde entier
▻https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/energie-environnement/les-antibiotiques-polluent-les-rivieres-du-monde-entier-818590.html

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Quatorze antibiotiques ont été retrouvés dans les rivières de 72 pays, d’après une étude britannique inédite révélée lundi 27 mai. Les concentrations d’antibiotiques trouvés dépassent jusqu’à 300 fois les niveaux « acceptables ». Un risque majeur puisque ce phénomène accentue le phénomène de résistance aux antibiotiques qui deviennent moins efficaces pour traiter certains symptômes.

Aucune n’est épargnée. Une étude présentée lundi 27 mai révèle que, de l’Europe à l’Asie en passant par l’Afrique, les concentrations d’antibiotiques relevées dans certaines rivières du monde dépassent largement les niveaux acceptables. La nouveauté de cette étude résulte du fait qu’il s’agit désormais d’un « problème mondial » car si, autrefois, les niveaux tolérés étaient le plus souvent dépassés en Asie et en Afrique - les sites les plus problématiques se trouvent au Bangladesh, Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan et Nigeria - l’Europe et l’Amérique ne sont plus en reste, note le communiqué de l’équipe de chercheurs de l’université britannique de York responsable de l’étude.

Les scientifiques ont ainsi analysé des prélèvements effectués sur 711 sites dans 72 pays sur six continents et ont détecté au moins un des 14 antibiotiques recherchés dans 65% des échantillons. Les chercheurs, qui présentaient leurs recherches lundi à un congrès à Helsinki, ont comparé ces prélèvements aux niveaux acceptables établis par le groupement d’industries pharmaceutiques AMR Industry Alliance, qui varient selon la substance.

Résultat, le métronidazole, utilisé contre les infections de la peau et de la bouche, est l’antibiotique qui dépasse le plus ce niveau acceptable, avec des concentrations allant jusqu’à 300 fois ce seuil sur un site au Bangladesh. Le niveau est également dépassé dans la Tamise. La ciprofloxacine est de son côté la substance qui dépasse le plus souvent le seuil de sûreté acceptable (sur 51 sites), tandis que le triméthoprime, utilisé dans le traitement des infections urinaires, est le plus fréquemment retrouvé.

#Candida_Auris: The Fungus Nobody Wants to Talk About - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/candida-auris-hospitals.html

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Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

In 30 years, I’ve never faced so tough a reporting challenge — and one so unexpected. Who wouldn’t want to talk about a fungus?

Last year, I began spade work on a series of articles about drug-resistant microbes: bacteria and fungi that have developed the ability to evade common medicines that we have used for decades.

Early on, I stumbled onto a compelling example. A woman in Alaska named Sari Bailey woke up one morning with green and yellow gunk coming out of her ear. Her doctor told her it was an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics. They didn’t work. Turns out she had a drug-resistant infection that rooted on her mastoid bone, just behind the ear. It nearly killed her and required multiple surgeries to clear.

#santé #endémie

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html

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Un effet méconnu de l’utilisation des #pesticides (qui s’additionne à l’utilisation intempestive des #antibiotiques) dans l’#agriculture : le développement de #mycoses résistantes aux antimycosiques chez l’être humain.

Antibiotics and antifungals are both essential to combat infections in people, but antibiotics are also used widely to prevent disease in farm animals, and antifungals are also applied to prevent agricultural plants from rotting. Some scientists cite evidence that rampant use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans.

#agriculture #élevage_industriel #candida_auris #santé

A game of chicken: how Indian poultry farming is creating global #superbugs

On a farm in the Rangareddy district in India, near the southern metropolis of Hyderabad, a clutch of chicks has just been delivered. Some 5,000 birds peck at one another, loitering around a warehouse which will become cramped as they grow. Outside the shed, stacks of bags contain the feed they will eat during their five-week-long lives. Some of them gulp down a yellow liquid from plastic containers - a sugar water fed to the chicks from the moment they arrive, the farm caretaker explains. “Now the supervisor will come,” she adds, “and we will have to start with whatever medicines he would ask us to give the chicks.”

The medicines are antibiotics, given to the birds to protect them against diseases or to make them gain weight faster so more can be grown each year at greater profit. One drug typically given this way is colistin. Doctors call it the “last hope” antibiotic because it is used to treat patients who are critically ill with infections which have become resistant to nearly all other drugs. The World Health Organisation has called for the use of such antibiotics, which it calls “critically important to human medicine”, to be restricted in animals and banned as growth promoters. Their continued use in farming increases the chance bacteria will develop resistance to them, leaving them useless when treating patients.

Yet thousands of tonnes of veterinary colistin was shipped to countries including Vietnam, India, South Korea and Russia in 2016, the Bureau can reveal. In India at least five animal pharmaceutical companies are openly advertising products containing colistin as growth promoters.

One of these companies, Venky’s, is also a major poultry producer. Apart from selling animal medicines and creating its own chicken meals, it also supplies meat directly and indirectly to fast food chains in India such as KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Dominos.

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▻https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2018-01-30/a-game-of-chicken-how-indian-poultry-farming-is-creating-glob
#inde #antibiotiques #santé

Study Confirms That Security Line In Airport Is A Hotbed For Viruses : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/08/645255357/where-are-the-most-viruses-in-an-airport-hint-its-probably-not-the-toilet

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When you go through airport security, you might wish you had a pair of gloves on like the TSA agents do.

Researchers have evidence that the plastic trays in security lines are a haven for respiratory viruses. The trays likely harbor more of these pathogens than the flushing button on the airport toilets, researchers reported last week in BMC Infectious Diseases.

[...]

The study was teeny-weenie. Virologists looked for viruses on 90 surfaces at the Helsinki Airport. And they took only eight samples from the plastic security trays over the course of three weeks. Half of those samples showed signs of at least one respiratory virus, such as influenza A or a coronavirus that can cause severe respiratory infections. (In contrast, none of the 42 samples taken from surfaces around the toilets showed traces of these viruses.)

[...]

Gendreau recommends using sanitizers that contain at least 60 percent alcohol or washing your hands with soap and water. “Just make sure you do if for 25 seconds,” he says.

And be careful about where you put your hands before you get a chance to clean them, Gendreau adds.

“The trick is to be mindful about not touching your face,” he says. “Eighty percent of all infections are transmitted by your hands: You touch a surface that’s contaminated with a virus and then introduce it into your body by touching your face. Humans touch their eyes, nose or mouth about 200 times a day.”

Existe-t-il une mémoire épigénétique des infections bactériennes ?
▻http://lille1tv.univ-lille1.fr/videos/video.aspx?id=17bd0e62-592c-4be9-b8ce-e636657fe943

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New report says completing a course of antibiotics even after symptoms abate is overrated
▻http://www.news-medical.net/news/20170726/New-report-says-completing-a-course-of-antibiotics-even-after-symptoms

Vers une remise en cause de la stratégie d’utilisation des antibiotiques ?

Scientists have explained the mechanism of development of antibiotic resistance.

• Target selected resistance - When a microbe multiplies within the host it leads to infection. These microbes may undergo genetic mutations that may make them deadlier and resistant to antibiotics. These genetic mutations are seen to be accelerated in case of inadequate dosing of the antibiotics or when a single drug is used to kill the microbe. Tuberculosis, HIV, typhoid, malaria and gonorrhoea are notable infections that develop resistance in this manner.

• Collateral selection – There are several bacteria types that live harmlessly within the gut or other mucus membranes. During antibiotic treatment for other infections, these harmless bacteria genetically mutate to become resistant and cause infections. Their mutations are passed on to other strains of the bacteria leading to antibiotic resistance. Organisms that show this type of resistance include Methicillin Resistant Staph aureus (MRSA).

Researchers have seen that most of the antibiotic resistance now does not come from the first type of resistance selection or target selection. This means the second type is more common. This also means that longer the duration of the antibiotic use, longer the time the harmless bacteria in the gut gets to develop resistance and pass it on to the other strains and species of bacteria. These harmless bacteria are called “opportunistic pathogens” which means they become dangerous only at certain times i.e. antibiotic use, immunosuppression etc.

In this new work, researchers have suggested optimum usage of antibiotics as the key to prevent resistance.

’Petya’ ransomware attack strikes companies across Europe and US | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/27/petya-ransomware-attack-strikes-companies-across-europe
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d0237f4c918c8b0a85e424d64b46650d5df5491e/0_110_5191_3115/master/5191.jpg

“This is not an experienced ransomware operator,” said Ryan Kalember, senior vice-president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint.

The attack was first reported in Ukraine, where the government, banks, state power utility and Kiev’s airport and metro system were all affected. The radiation monitoring system at Chernobyl was taken offline, forcing employees to use hand-held counters to measure levels at the former nuclear plant’s exclusion zone.

Some technology experts said the attack appeared consistent with an “updated variant” of a virus known as Petya or Petrwrap, a ransomware that locks computer files and forces users to pay a designated sum to regain access.

But analysts at cyber security firm Kaspersky Labs said they had traced the infections to “a new ransomware that has not been seen before”. The “NotPetya” attack had hit 2,000 users in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, France, Italy, the UK, Germany and the US, Kaspersky said.

#Microsoft #virus_informatique #Ransomware #petya #notpetya #extorsion #bitcoin #tchernobyl

Superbug infections rising rapidly and spreading silently in kids
▻https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/multidrug-resistant-infections-hitting-kids-hard-750-increase-since-200

Looking over records from 48 children’s hospitals around the country, the researchers picked out 107,610 hospital stays (involving 94,528 different patients from infants to less than 18) that included a diagnoses of an Enterobacteriaceae infection. Most of them were urinary tract infections caused by E. coli.

Overall, just 724 of those infections were caused by bacteria that could survive multiple types of antibiotic treatments. That’s just 0.7 percent of the infections. But the proportion increased over time. In 2007, only 0.2 percent of infections were multidrug-resistant. By 2015, the percentage hit 1.5—that’s a 750 percent increase.

Kids with a multidrug-resistant infection had 20 percent longer stays in the hospital, the researchers noted.

But most kids didn’t become infected while they were in the hospital, where drug-resistant bacteria are known to develop and lurk among the vulnerable. Instead, 551 of the 724 multidrug-resistant infections—or 76 percent—were present in kids when they arrived at the hospital. This suggests that they became infected out in the community.

“Once these organisms are in the community, they will spread,” Meropol said. “We can catch them anywhere.”

#bactéries #résistance #antibiotiques #enfants #Etats-Unis

How hospitals, nursing homes keep lethal ‘superbug’ outbreaks #secret
▻http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncounted-outbreaks

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are sickened and tens of thousands die from infections by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and C. difficile, a pathogen linked to long-term antibiotic use. Timely reporting of outbreaks of these infections is essential to stopping the spread of disease and saving lives, public health experts and patient advocates say.

Yet the United States lacks a unified nationwide system for reporting and tracking outbreaks. Instead, a patchwork of state laws and guidelines, inconsistently applied, tracks clusters of the deadly infections that the federal government 15 years ago labeled a grave threat to public health.

As a result, the United States has no way to count the deadly spikes in infections that hit the nation. Reuters, drawing on reports from 29 state health departments, has assembled one of the most comprehensive counts yet - identifying at least 300 superbug outbreaks around the nation from 2011 to 2016. The number of people affected was impossible to determine because many reports didn’t include a count of the infected or the dead.

#résistance_aux_antibiotiques #infection #santé

No one knows how many patients are dying from superbug infections in California hospitals
▻http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-torrance-memorial-infections-20161002-snap-story.html

An epidemic of hospital-acquired infections is going unreported, scientists have found.

University of Michigan researchers reported in a 2014 study that infections – both those acquired inside and outside hospitals – would replace heart disease and cancer as the leading causes of death in hospitals if the count was performed by looking at patients’ medical billing records, which show what they were being treated for, rather than death certificates.

[...]

California does not track deaths from hospital-acquired infections. And unlike two dozen other states, California does not require hospitals to report when patients are sickened by the rare, lethal superbug that afflicted McMullen, raising questions about whether health officials are doing enough to stop its spread.

McMullen’s daughter Chen said she called the Los Angeles County public health department to report that her mother had been diagnosed with CRKP, which stands for carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, at Torrance Memorial. When the bacteria gets into a patient’s blood, it kills as many as half its victims.

A county employee told her it was not a reportable infection. “She said, ‘It’s everywhere,’” Chen said.

#infections_iatrogènes #bactéries #antibiotiques #résistance_aux_antibiotiques #santé

Hepatitis A outbreak linked to smoothies spans 5 states; 51 sick | Food Safety News
▻http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2016/08/hepatitis-a-outbreak-linked-to-smoothies-spans-5-states-51-sick

More than 50 people in five states are confirmed with Hepatitis A infections in an outbreak associated with frozen strawberries from Egypt that were served at Tropical Smoothie Café locations in Virginia.

The vast majority of the infected people — 44 — are Virginia residents, according to the Virginia Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are also four confirmed victims in Maryland and one each in North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin, a CDC spokeswoman said Tuesday.
[…]
Virginia officials notified the Tropical Smoothie Café chain at that point, but did not alert the public for another two weeks.

“On Aug. 5 the Virginia Department of Health contacted us about a potential link between Hepatitis A cases and frozen strawberries from Egypt,” CEO Mike Rotondo says in a YouTube video posted Sunday by Tropical Smoothie Café.

The restaurant chain immediately removed the implicated fruit from all of its locations, Rotondo says in the video. Tropical Smoothie is now sourcing strawberries from California and Mexico.

While pulling the implicated strawberries may have reduced the number of outbreak victims, some Tropical Smoothie customers likely could have been spared infection if Virginia officials had not waited 14 days before alerting the public.

That two-week delay is key because of the narrow window of opportunity for post-exposure vaccination. The post-exposure Hepatitis A vaccine, or immune globulin (IG) injections, must be administered within 14 days of exposure or they are not effective, according to Virginia health officials and CDC.

‘A’-grade hospitals have 50% fewer avoidable deaths | Managed Healthcare Executive
▻http://managedhealthcareexecutive.modernmedicine.com/managed-healthcare-executive/news/grade-hospitals-have-50-fewer-avoidable-deaths

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It is much safer to receive care at an “A” hospital versus a “B,” “C,” “D” or “F” hospital, according to new analysis led by Matt Austin, PhD, assistant professor at the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

Leapfrog contracted with Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality on a new analysis estimating the number of avoidable deaths at hospitals in each grade level. The analysis finds that despite considerable improvement in the safety of hospital care since the Score’s launch in 2012, avoidable deaths remain high. 

Findings point to a 9% higher risk of avoidable death in B hospitals, 35% higher in C hospitals, and 50% higher in D and F hospitals, than in A hospitals.

The Hospital Safety Score estimates patients’ relative risk of avoidable death from errors, accidents, and infections and grades hospitals with an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” or “F.” The Hospital Safety Score is the only rating that focuses primarily on errors, accidents, and infections in hospitals. 

Of the 2,571 hospitals issued a Hospital Safety Score, 798 earned an “A,” 639 earned a “B,” 957 earned a “C,” 162 earned a “D” and 15 earned an “F.”

(l’image provient de l’étude citée en lien
▻http://www.hospitalsafetyscore.org/liveslost )

Your Roommate Is Changing Your Immune System - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/your-roommate-is-changing-your-immune-system

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Our veins are swimming with immune cells of many different kinds. Some bear the memory of previous infections, in case we should encounter them again; some are actively fighting invaders; others are merely on the look-out. Counting all of the varieties of cells and what molecules they are producing gives researchers a profile of someone’s immune system. In a study of more than 600 people, published recently in Nature Immunology, just such an analysis revealed that people’s immune systems are incredibly stable over time—even getting a vaccine or a stomach upset changed things only briefly, before the immune cells returned to normal. It also showed that almost the only thing that will change a given person’s normal seems to be living with a partner.Maintaining a relationship isn’t the best (...)

The 1899 Kissing Bug Epidemic That (Probably) Wasn’t | Mental Floss
▻http://mentalfloss.com/article/73604/1899-kissing-bug-epidemic-probably-wasnt

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“At night I experienced an attack, & it deserves no less a name, of the Benchuca, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body; before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards round & bloated with blood, & in this state they are easily squashed.”

—Charles Darwin, March 26, 1835

The bug Darwin speaks of is a member of a group colloquially referred to as “kissing bugs.” Scientifically speaking, the “great black bug of the Pampas” was probably a bloodsucker called Triatoma infestans, an insect which is the primary vector of a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi. This parasite causes Chagas disease, a debilitating infection that harms the victim in two stages: an acute phase that begins about a week after the bug bite and causes fever and occasional swelling at the site of the bite, and a chronic phase that shows up as long as 25 years after exposure, where the patient’s organs are irreversibly damaged. Organ damage primarily targets the heart and digestive system.

Chagas disease is endemic throughout South and Central America and Mexico, resulting in about 6 million new cases and 7000 to 12,000 deaths per year. Though still rare, increasingly cases have been diagnosed in the U.S. as well, for two main reasons: movement across borders by infected individuals, bringing T. cruzi with them from endemic countries; and new infections acquired in the U.S., which are extremely rare. The kissing bugs that spread Chagas disease can be found in 28 states, though they’re most common in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, but human bites are rare—the bugs are able to feed on a wide variety of animal species.

While most people may not view kissing bugs as a fearful threat today, that wasn’t the case for a short period in the summer of 1899 when kissing bug hysteria reigned in the U.S., according to a research team led by Melissa Nolan Garcia at Baylor College of Medicine.

#insectes #suggestion #épidémie #press #hoax

Curb Antibiotic Use in Farm Animals - Scientific American
▻http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/curb-antibiotic-use-in-farm-animals

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In 2013 the Food and Drug Administration finally stepped in, asking drug companies to stop selling antibiotics for the purpose of promoting the growth of animals by December 2016. The agency still allows the use of these drugs for “disease prevention,” however—that is, to fight off infections animals have not yet gotten. In principle, it might sound reasonable. In practice, this loophole may be big enough to allow farmers to continue with what they have been doing all along, raising concerns that the fda’s plan will not amount to much.

To make things worse, the #FDA resisted developing a meaningful plan to evaluate the effect of its action. Instead it intends simply to rely on sales data from drug companies to see whether its (nonbinding) guidelines are actually working. These data are far from ideal for this purpose; even the agency acknowledges that sales are not a reliable way to gauge how antibiotics are really being used.

Cohabitation—or maybe parenthood—shapes our immune system
But oddly, shared infections and vaccinations didn’t.
▻http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/02/cohabitation-or-maybe-parenthood-shapes-our-immune-system

Saigas, an Endangered Antelope, Dying of Mystery Disease
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/science/saiga-antelope-mystery-disease-die-off.html

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In the past two weeks, more than third of all saigas have been killed, conservationists have found.

[...]

“To lose 120,000 animals in two or three weeks is a phenomenal thing.”

[...]

The scientists found that the animals were infected with two species of deadly bacteria, Pasteurella and Clostridium. But Dr. Kock is convinced that the bacteria are not the fundamental cause of the die-off.

Both species of bacteria are present in healthy animals, becoming lethal only when the animals grow weak. Dr. Kock also observed that the saiga died so quickly from their infections that they could not have spread the bacteria to other animals.

“The time period is too short,” he said.

Dr. Kock and his colleagues are investigating other factors that may have triggered the die-off, including the possibility of an unknown virus. Dr. Kock said it will take three or four weeks to isolate any agent in the necropsy tissues.

The scientists are also looking at how changes in the environment may have put stress on the saiga. Heavy rainfall this year may have altered the ecology of the steppes, disrupting their food supply, for example.

[...]

“The die-off may not be over,” she said. “This is unconfirmed, but it fills us with great fear.”

#extinction #saïgas #biodiversité

Kremlin Nukes Every Spark of Revolution | Opinion | The Moscow Times
▻http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/nuclear-medicine-against-color-revolutions/518251.html

Last week, the Russian Security Council published its analysis of the 35-page National Security Strategy that the U.S. published in early February, thereby giving an indication of just how thoroughly Russian officials study U.S. doctrinal papers.

On average, the Kremlin devoted one full day of study for each half-page of text, and yet, amazingly, it managed to completely overlook a number of factors that Washington considers essential to U.S. national security. These include improving domestic prosperity, the ongoing fight against global poverty and the struggle against deadly infections and international terrorism.

As expected, the Security Council chose to focus on the fact that the document is openly “anti-Russian.” And in one sense, they are right.

Indeed, Moscow no longer has grounds for complaining that it receives too little attention from Washington, as it did with the previous National Security Strategy doctrine released five years ago. Russia is mentioned constantly in this document — right alongside the Islamic State, Ebola and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. sets out to prove that it is leading the world in combating these threats. The doctrine states, “We mobilized and are leading global efforts to impose costs to counter Russian aggression, to degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamic State, to squelch the Ebola virus at its source, to stop the spread of nuclear weapons materials, and to turn the corner on global carbon emissions.”

Par moments, ça a l’air tellement naïf que ça frôle le second degré…

Significantly, Security Council experts contend that the threat to Russia stems from U.S. military superiority and Washington’s intention to use some sort of “advanced techniques for color revolutions” against it.

And while the U.S. doctrine does openly state a desire for military superiority, it makes no mention of any desire to topple the Moscow regime. Apparently, that is how Security Council experts interpreted Washington’s intention to support people’s struggle for their rights and for the rule of law.

From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html

The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.

Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.

Teixobactin has not yet been tested in humans, so its safety and effectiveness are not known. Studies in people will not begin for about two years, according to Kim Lewis, the senior author of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. Those studies will take several years, so even if the drug passes all the required tests, it still will not be available for five or six years, he said during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. If it is approved, he said, it will probably have to be injected, not taken by mouth.

(...)

The new research is based on the premise that everything on earth — plants, soil, people, animals — is teeming with microbes that compete fiercely to survive. Trying to keep one another in check, the microbes secrete biological weapons: antibiotics.

“The way bacteria multiply, if there weren’t natural mechanisms to limit their growth, they would have covered the planet and eaten us all eons ago,” Dr. Schaffner said.

Scientists and drug companies have for decades exploited the microbes’ natural arsenal, often by mining soil samples, and discovered lifesaving antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin and tetracycline, as well as some powerful chemotherapy drugs for cancer. But disease-causing organisms have become resistant to many existing drugs, and there has been a major obstacle to finding replacements, Dr. Lewis said: About 99 percent of the microbial species in the environment are bacteria that do not grow under usual laboratory conditions.

Dr. Lewis and his colleagues found a way to grow them. The process involves diluting a soil sample — the one that yielded teixobactin came from “a grassy field in Maine” — and placing it on specialized equipment. Then, the secret to success is putting the equipment into a box full of the same soil that the sample came from.

“Essentially, we’re tricking the bacteria,” Dr. Lewis said. Back in their native dirt, they divide and grow into colonies. Once the colonies form, Dr. Lewis said, the bacteria are “domesticated,” and researchers can scoop them up and start growing them in petri dishes in the laboratory.

The research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the German government (some co-authors work at the University of Bonn). Northeastern University holds a patent on the method of producing drugs and licensed the patent to a private company, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Mass., which owns the rights to any compounds produced. Dr. Lewis is a paid consultant to the company.

#santé #antibiotiques #bactéries #cancer #argent #public #privé

#Saudi_Arabia confirms seven new #MERS cases
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/saudi-arabia-confirms-seven-new-mers-cases

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A Saudi medical staff and a security guard stand at the closed gate of the emergency department as exit and entry is banned at the city’s King Fahd Hospital, on April 9, 2014 in Jeddah. (Photo: AFP)

Saudi Arabia has confirmed seven new cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), adding up to 36 infections in five days, a sudden increase of a disease that kills about a third of the people infected and has no known cure. MERS, a SARS-like coronavirus that emerged in Saudi Arabia two years ago, has infected 231 people in the kingdom, of whom 76 have died, the Health Ministry said on its website. Meanwhile, another cluster of cases has been detected in the United Arab Emirates, and a Malaysian who was recently in the Gulf has been confirmed as infected, his (...)

#Top_News

Les femmes vivent plus vieilles que les hommes, c’est à cause de leurs hormones.
Elles perdent moins vite leurs lymphocytes.

Women’s immune systems hold the secret to longer life - Telegraph
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10056901/Womens-immune-systems-hold-the-secret-to-longer-life.html

A new study has shown that levels of key white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting off infections, become lower in men as they get older compared to women.
The average life expectancy for men in the UK is 79 years old, while for women it is 82 years old. In some parts of the world, such as Japan, the gap is even larger, with women living on average nearly six years longer.
(…)
Scientists in Japan have now uncovered another reason after finding that the levels of white blood cells and other parts of the immune system called cytokines decline faster in men.
They believe this might be because female sex hormones such as oestrogen can boost the immune system’s response to infections.

New #coronavirus caused infections in Jordan in April, retrospective tests show | Calgary Herald
►http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/confirms+more+fatal+cases+virus+Jordan+possible+virus+spread/7634150/story.html
(encore et toujours les Canadiens en pointe sur ce sujet)

The agency says retrospective testing of stored samples show two people who died in Jordan in April were infected with the virus, which is from the same virus family as SARS.

Ce qui porte à 9 le nombre de cas confirmés de grippe #chiroptère.

Nouveauté, l’un des deux décès jordaniens concerne un professionnel de santé.

The Jordanian cases may signal spread from patients to health-care workers happened there. But it’s too soon to conclude that, said WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl, who noted the health-care workers and the patients could have been infected for a common — and as yet unidentified — source.

Les choses sont encore assez floues pour cet épisode d’avril, puisque l’article du Calgary Herald se termine par cette phrase (sans lien logique avec ce qui précède) :

A report on the outbreak — noted in a weekly disease report from the European Centre for Disease Control in May — said seven nurses and a doctor were among 11 cases identified in the outbreak at a hospital in Zarqa, Jordan.

Mais dans cet article du Jordan Times du 21/04/12 , cité hier 30/11/12 sur un blog spécialisé, 9 cas seulement sont mentionnés : 7 infirmières dont une décédée, 1 médecin et le frère de l’infirmière décédée.
►http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2012/11/jordan-april-reports-on-the-novel-coronavirus.html

L’information nouvelle est donc la confirmation du nouveau coronavirus pour deux des prélèvements faits sur des patients d’avril mais testés en octobre. Ils avaient déjà été testés – négativement – en avril par le même laboratoire, NAMRU-3 (US Naval Medical Research Unit au Caire), mais le coronavirus n’avait pas encore été identifié.

Information détaillée, là : CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy de l’Université du Minnesota.
►http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/other/sars/news/nov3012corona.html

A vot’ santé ! :-)

Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants

►http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/what-is-fecal-transplant-difficile-bacteria

Gross as it sounds, an infusion of good bacteria—in the form of someone else’s excrement—seems to help fight some infections.

Fecal transplantation isn’t a new idea; the first reported case of someone receiving the treatment was in 1958. Undoubtedly, the “ick” factor has limited its appeal. But given the emerging evidence of effectiveness in some hard-to-treat cases, doctors and patients are taking much more notice. So here are some things you might want to know.

First, is a ’fecal transplant’ what it sounds like?

Yes, pretty much. In the treatment (also called fecal microbiota therapy or fecal bacteriotherapy), a small amount of human waste is inserted into the patient’s gut, or gastrointestinal system, via colonoscopy, enema, or nasogastric tube. Some doctors obtain the “medicine” from the patient’s spouse, child, or friend; others find it preferable to work with anonymous donors. While most prepare a liquid solution, frozen feces have also been used successfully; so far no one has standardized the treatment protocol.

Of course, it’s not the fecal matter per se that’s of interest, but the fact that it’s swarming with microbes. (Donors are screened for the presence of any infectious diseases that could be transmitted through their feces.) The goal is to restore the natural balance of organisms in the gastrointestinal tract. Any number of factors and conditions can knock this balance out of whack, including many antibiotics that are used to fight infections. The drugs kill the pathogens but they also wipe out the beneficial bacteria that live in the gut; the fecal transplant allows these helpful microbes to recolonize the digestive organs.

#Santé #Caca #Transfusion_fécale

6 Kinds of Pills Big Pharma Tries to Get You Hooked on for Life | Martha Rosenberg (AlterNet)
►http://www.alternet.org/story/155170/6_kinds_of_pills_big_pharma_tries_to_get_you_hooked_on_for_life?page=entir

Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in the late 1990s, the number of people on prescription drugs for life has ballooned. Why has Big Pharma failed to produce new antibiotics for deadly infections like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci), C. Difficile and Acinetobacter baumannii even as they leap from hospital to community settings? Because there is no money in it. (...) Source: AlterNet