Pharmaceutical companies are often reluctant to develop new antibiotics to combat "superbugs" which have adapted and found a way around standard antibiotics that have worked for years. This reluctancy stems from the fact that they won't make huge profits from such specialized drugs. Unless the government gets involved and starts funding research for development of new antibiotics, we'll get behind the curve and be faced with serious infections we can't cure. It's already happening.
March 2006
Officials with the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) are calling on government officials to introduce and enact legislation that would offer market exclusivity to pharmaceutical companies that research and develop novel antimicrobials for “superbugs,” or highly dangerous, drug-resistant microbes. They also identified a representative “hit list” of microbes that are most in need of research — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Escherichia coli and Klebsiella species, Acinetobacter baumannii, Aspergillus species, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
MRSA infections constitute the single most important cause of health care–associated infections, increasing lengths of hospital stay, severity of illness, deaths and costs. Although these infections occurred primarily in hospitals, they are becoming increasingly common in communities nationwide, especially where groups of people are in close quarters, including military facilities, sports teams and prisons. The number of infected children jumped 28% between 2001 and 2004, according to Blaser. Although there are treatment options available for MRSA, most medications need to be administered by injection; oral drugs are desperately needed.
“
is a prime example of a mismatch between unmet medical need and the current antimicrobial research and development pipeline,” wrote researchers in an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases, which announced the IDSA’s “hit list.” The bacterium is a growing cause of hospital-acquired pneumonia, and the number and hardiness of drug-resistant strains are growing, researchers said. Soldiers are also returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with cases of highly resistant Acinetobacter wound infections. In the case of A. baumannii, physicians have been forced to resort to an old drug, colistin, which had previously been abandoned as too toxic. IDSA officials said only one new drug is on the horizon to treat Acinetobacter infections, and it is considered to be too toxic for children.
Discussing the other organisms, Blaser and colleagues said that although there are treatment options for all of them, these bugs’ abilities to develop resistance have made treatment difficult. IDSA officials said there are relatively few new therapies in the pipeline for any of them.
http://www.infectiousdiseasenews.com
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