Antibiotic Resistance: Blame It on Lifesaving Malaria Drug? [News]

Monday, July 21, 2008 - 13:07 in Health & Medicine

A new study shows that overuse of a drug used to prevent and treat malaria may be contributing to growing antibiotic resistance. Researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE that Escherichia coli bacteria resistant to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin were detected in the digestive tracts of villagers from remote rainforest communities in Guyana who had been given the drug chloroquine to prevent and treat malaria, a potentially fatal disease spread by mosquitoes. This is the first study to show that resistance can emerge in individuals never exposed to the antibiotic, which is used throughout the world to treat bacterial infections, including pneumonia, urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases."Ten to 15 years ago, resistance to ciprofloxacin was rare. [Now], outside of remote populations, cipro resistance in hospitals and the community at large is becoming a problem," says Andrew Simor, a senior scientist at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study. "E. coli is one of the most common causes of infections in humans. A decade ago it was nearly universally susceptible to ciprofloxacin." Today, he says, as many as 30 percent of hospital patients tested have E. coli that failed to respond to ciprofloxacin, which is the drug of choice for treating these bacteria. [More]

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