Related Research Articles
An antibiotic is a type of antimicrobial substance active against bacteria. It is the most important type of antibacterial agent for fighting bacterial infections, and antibiotic medications are widely used in the treatment and prevention of such infections. They may either kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. A limited number of antibiotics also possess antiprotozoal activity. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses such as the ones which cause the common cold or influenza; drugs which inhibit growth of viruses are termed antiviral drugs or antivirals rather than antibiotics. They are also not effective against fungi; drugs which inhibit growth of fungi are called antifungal drugs.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when microbes evolve mechanisms that protect them from the effects of antimicrobials. All classes of microbes can evolve resistance to the point that one or more drugs used to fight them are no longer effective. Fungi evolve antifungal resistance, viruses evolve antiviral resistance, protozoa evolve antiprotozoal resistance, and bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance. Together all of these come under the umbrella of antimicrobial resistance.
Klebsiella pneumoniae is a Gram-negative, non-motile, encapsulated, lactose-fermenting, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped bacterium. It appears as a mucoid lactose fermenter on MacConkey agar.
Phage therapy, viral phage therapy, or phagotherapy is the therapeutic use of bacteriophages for the treatment of pathogenic bacterial infections. This therapeutic approach emerged at the beginning of the 20th century but was progressively replaced by the use of antibiotics in most parts of the world after the Second World War. Bacteriophages, known as phages, are a form of virus that attach to bacterial cells and inject their genome into the cell. The bacteria's production of the viral genome interferes with its ability to function, halting the bacterial infection. The bacterial cell causing the infection is unable to reproduce and instead produces additional phages. Phages are very selective in the strains of bacteria they are effective against.
Thailand has had "a long and successful history of health development," according to the World Health Organization. Life expectancy is averaged at seventy years. Non-communicable diseases form the major burden of morbidity and mortality, while infectious diseases including malaria and tuberculosis, as well as traffic accidents, are also important public health issues.
NDM-1 is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics. These include the antibiotics of the carbapenem family, which are a mainstay for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The gene for NDM-1 is one member of a large gene family that encodes beta-lactamase enzymes called carbapenemases. Bacteria that produce carbapenemases are often referred to in the news media as "superbugs" because infections caused by them are difficult to treat. Such bacteria are usually sensitive only to polymyxins and tigecycline.
Antibiotics are commonly used in commercial swine production in the United States and around the world. They are used for disease treatment, disease prevention and control, and growth promotion. When used for growth promoting purposes, antibiotics are given at low concentrations for long periods of time. Low concentration of antibiotics, also referred to as subtherapeutic (STA), are given as feed and water additives which improve daily weight gain and feed efficiency through alterations in digestion and disease suppression. Additionally, the use of STA in swine results in healthier animals and reduces the “microbial load” on meat resulting in an assumed decrease in potential Foodborne illness risk. While the benefits of subtherapeutic antibiotic administration are well-documented, there is much concern and debate regarding the development of bacterial antibiotic resistance associated with their use.
Antibiotic use in livestock is the use of antibiotics for any purpose in the husbandry of livestock, which includes treatment when ill (therapeutic), treatment of a group of animals when at least one is diagnosed with clinical infection (metaphylaxis), and preventative treatment (prophylaxis). Antibiotics are an important tool to treat animal as well as human disease, safeguard animal health and welfare, and support food safety. However, used irresponsibly, this may lead to antibiotic resistance which may impact human, animal and environmental health.
The Longitude Prize is an inducement prize contest offered by Challenge Works, a social enterprise which was historically part of Nesta, a British lottery funded charity, in the spirit of the 18th-century Longitude rewards. It runs a £10 million prize fund, offering an £8 million payout to the team of researchers that develops an affordable, accurate, and fast point of care test for bacterial infection that is easy to use anywhere in the world. Such a test will allow the conservation of antibiotics for future generations and help solve the global problem of antimicrobial resistance.
The Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) is a not-for-profit initiative created in 2015 reaching out to chemists in academia and research organisations who have compounds that were not designed as antibiotics and would not otherwise be screened for antimicrobial activity. These academic compounds are screened against a key panel of drug-resistant bacterial strains -superbugs. Multi-drug resistant microbes are a serious health treat, and exploration of novel chemical diversity is essential to find new antibiotics.
Gerard D. Wright, PhD, FRSC, is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and Canada Research Chair in Antibiotic Biochemistry at McMaster University who studies chemical compounds that can combat antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He is also an Associate member of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Pathology and Molecular Medicine. Wright was Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences from 2001 to 2007. He was the Director of McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research from 2007 to 2022. He is currently the executive director of Canada's Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats. He is also founding director of the McMaster Antimicrobial Research Centre, and co-founder of the McMaster High Throughput Screening Facility.
Maryn McKenna is an American author and journalist. She has written for Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American, and spoke on antibiotics at TED 2015.
Siouxsie Wiles is a British microbiologist and science communicator. Her specialist areas are infectious diseases and bioluminescence. She is based in New Zealand.
Structurally nanoengineered antimicrobial polypeptide polymers (SNAPPs) are a type of artificially designed synthetic antimicrobial peptide. The development of the polymers is potentially a treatment for bacterial diseases. The research takes a novel approach to combating bacteria; rather than poisoning them as antibiotics do, SNAPPs and other antimicrobial peptides tear the bacteria apart.
Kevin Outterson is a lawyer, a professor of law and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor Boston University School of Law (2023-present). He is also the executive director of Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, a global non-profit partnership that supports companies developing new antibiotics, diagnostics, vaccines and other products to address drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Asad Ullah Khan is an Indian microbiologist, biochemist and a professor at the Interdisciplinary Biotechnology Unit of the Aligarh Muslim University. He is known for his studies on multidrug resistant clinical strains as well as for the first sighting in India of Aligarh super bug (NDM-4), a variant of New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1). He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Biotech Research Society, India and the Indian Academy of Microbiological Sciences. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2012.
Kastus Technologies is an Irish multinational nanotechnology company that specialises in patented, visible-light-activated, photocatalytic, antimicrobial coatings. These coatings prevent the growth of bacteria on surfaces such as ceramics, glass, and touchscreens, with no negative side effects for the end user. Founded in Dublin in 2014, Kastus’ antimicrobial coatings were in development for over 10 years as part of a collaboration with Dublin Institute of Technology and the Advanced Materials and Bio Engineering Research (AMBER) Centres.
Marie-Paule Kieny is a French virologist, vaccinologist, public health expert and science writer. She is currently director of research at INSERM and chief of the board at DNDi.
Benjamin K. Chan is a research scientist at Yale University in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was born in 1980 to a U.S. Asian father, an engineer, and an American mother. He is known for his work in phage therapy exploiting genetic trade-offs to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. He currently lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Cynthia B. Whitchurch is an Australian microbiologist. Whitchurch is a research group leader at the Quadram Institute on the Norwich Research Park in the United Kingdom and was previously the founding director of the Microbial Imaging Facility and a Research Group Leader in the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in New South Wales.
References
- ↑ "Watch Swine". June 23, 2016.
- ↑ "Facing the Future of Antibiotic Resistance - The Change Starts Here". HuffPost . 12 July 2017 [Original date 18 July 2016].
