Doctors identify antibiotic-proof strep bacteria
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, April 18, 2002
For the first time, doctors have documented a large-scale U.S. outbreak of antibiotic-resistant strep throat -- an episode involving at least 46 Pittsburgh schoolchildren.
The jump in resistance was detected early last year at a private school, where roughly half the strep throat cases were found to be untreatable with erythromycin. All the children were successfully treated with other drugs.
"It definitely went from one kid to another in the school, and it also spilled over into the community," said lead researcher Dr. Judith Martin of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh's Division of Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Disease. "Where it started, I don't know."
Until now, antibiotics have easily killed group A streptococcus, the bacterium that causes strep throat and life-threatening septic infections, so doctors at the hospital were startled by its sudden, widespread resistance to the widely used erythromycin. The drug is commonly given to people allergic to penicillin.
Doctors suspect the strep bacteria also are becoming resistant to other popular drugs in the same antibiotic family, the macrolides.
The study was reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
Texas has not seen a similar strep resistance to erythromycin, but it has had "some small resistance" to Levaquin, another antibiotic used to treat strep, Texas Department of Health nurse epidemiologist Neil Pascoe told the Austin American-Statesman.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a huge problem everywhere, he added, and what is happening in Pittsburgh "demonstrates the ability of germs to adapt to their environment when you continually challenge them with antibiotics. . . . It will continue to be a problem until we revise our thinking about drugs." |
