E.Coli superbug

[GMonkey]

Medical News: Medical Tourists at Risk for New 'Superbug' - in Infectious Disease, Public Health from MedPage Today

Interesting article. I first read about this in the ProMed email. I read a similar article on a news site which pissed me off because people were assuming this was a conspiracy to make more money for big pharma and plastic surgeons in the UK and US. They were also saying that avian influenza, H1N1, etc were all hype and fear mongering and it turned out to be "nothing". For one thing, over 18,000 people died of H1N1, which is a pretty big deal. The reason that these diseases weren't as catastrophic as they could have been is because the CDC was successful in getting the word out and people actually listened by getting vaccinated, staying home when sick, and most importantly...washing their friggin' hands!

[CHIOSSO]

I am immunosuppressed and this sh!t scares me to death.

[OKT3]

It is scary. I knew they would mention colistin in that article. It is amazing and disconcerting that some of these old-school antibiotics are coming back into use for multi-drug resistant infections. Their use dwindled because of toxicity, and development of better and safer abx. Now there is a real problem with resistant Acinetobacter, and in many cases only kidney-toxic drugs like colistin and polymyxin will treat.