COMMON BACTERIA isolated in Britain and India have developed near total resistance to all forms of antibiotics.
A team of UK and international researchers described the emergence of such comprehensive antibiotic resistance as “a worldwide public health problem” and called for “co-ordinated international surveillance” to monitor its spread.
Details of their research are published this morning in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. The paper describes how very common bacteria such as E.coli have begun to pick up a specific gene – NDM-1 – that renders them resistant to all but the most powerful antibiotics.
Dr Timothy Walsh of Cardiff University and colleagues in the UK, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh went looking for bacteria that had picked up the NDM-1 antibiotic resistance gene and readily found them in all four countries. All of the bacteria with the gene were highly resistant to antibiotics but, in some cases, the bacteria were completely resistant to all antibiotics, the authors said.
They found the NDM-1 gene in a range of organisms but it was most often found in two very common bacteria, E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. These two are the most frequent causes of urinary tract infections and trigger a collection of other illnesses in humans.
More importantly, they found that the resistance gene tended to be found in a packaged piece of DNA that could easily be copied and transferred between different bacteria. The NDM-1 gene therefore had “an alarming potential to spread and diversify among bacterial populations”, the authors write.
The spread of the gene had been aided by international travel, and alarmingly, by so called “medical tourism”, the authors say. A number of the UK patients presenting with the resistant bacteria “had undergone elective, including cosmetic, surgery while visiting India or Pakistan”, the authors continue. “India also provides cosmetic surgery for other Europeans and Americans and will likely spread worldwide.” The potential for the NDM-1 gene to become endemic worldwide was “clear and frightening”, they conclude.
While it was highly unlikely that antibiotics would lose their medical value, “there is a warning there for us all,” said Prof Hilary Humphreys, professor of clinical microbiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and consultant microbiologist at Beaumont Hospital.
“It shows that there are no boundaries or borders to the spread of infection”, he said.