Antibiotic resistance plague
A strain of bacterium could easily develop drug-resistance and become a major health threat, warn scientists.
A study, published on the 21 March 2007 in PLoS ONE, found that the drug-resistance genes in a plague bacterium from a 1995 case of the disease were the same as those in many common bacteria and are able to ‘jump’ from bacteria to bacteria.
The researchers say this illustrates how easily Yersinia pestis, the bacterium causing plague can develop resistance to antibiotics, which are vital in the treatment and prevention of the disease. There is no vaccine available for plague and this represents a significant public health concern.
A new multi-drug-resistant form of Yersinia pestis was found in a 16-year-old boy in Madagascar (1995). The strain had developed resistance against eight different groups of antibiotics including streptomycin and tetracycline.
Researchers discovered that the genes conferring this resistance are also in common food poisoning bacterium such as salmonella, E. coli, klebsiella, shigella and listeria from market samples of beef, pork, chicken and turkey in the United States.
As these genes are able to transmit themselves between bacteria, it raises the possibility of drug resistant Yersinia pestis emerging easily.
Lead author Jacques Ravel, of the US-based Institute for Genomic Research, says, “Our agricultural and medical use and abuse of antibiotics is generating a large reservoir of bacteria carrying resistance genes. These genes can transfer from bacteria to bacteria.”
The key to controlling any outbreak of plague lies in prompt treatment with common antibiotics such as tetracycline and streptomycin, which can reduce death rates from 60 to 15 per cent.
Kamal Krishna Datta, former director of India’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases who oversaw the 1994 plague outbreak in Surat, western India says the discovery “needs to be widely shared and discussed and the disease surveillance mechanism strengthened through a global network.”
In the past five years alone, plague has been reported in Algeria, India, Malawi and Zambia. The last reported case was in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006.
