Why experts believe antibiotics will soon be useless

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A new type of bacteria is on the rise to become a superbug that leaves humans defenseless against it despite antibiotics, Yahoo! News reports. These superbugs were found in southern China and may set the medical world back with its abilities to defy the protective powers of antibiotics.

A study was conducted by Jian-Hua Liu, a professor at Southern Agricultural University in Guangzhou and his colleagues, who found a gene called MCR-1 that enables bacteria to be resistant to a class of antibiotics called polymyxins, which fights bugs. The MCR-1 gene is also commonly found in deadly bacteria such as E. coli and K. pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia and blood disease. The researchers also found in the study that the MCR-1 gene enables the bacteria to spread freely from one strain or species to another.

"Polymyxins were the last class of antibiotics in which resistance was incapable of spreading from cell to cell," Dr. Liu explained.

Judith Johnson, an expert on emerging pathogens at the University of Florida, commented, "It is likely inevitable that polymyxin resistance will be added to the arsenal of multi-drug resistant bacteria and that they will spread globally."

These superbugs were discovered through a routine health testing of pigs and chickens in southern China, where they found that the animals carried bacteria resistant to colistin, a commonly used antibiotic for livestock farming.

Infectious disease expert Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake of the Australian National University told News, "About 80 percent of the total volume of antibiotics used in the US are used in animals - not humans. Given the contact we have with those animals and their food products, the resistance in animals becomes an issue in humans too."

University of Cardiff Professor Timothy Walsh, who also collaborated on the study, told BBC, "If MCR-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era."

Yahoo! News reports that last year, about 480,000 people were affected by multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, which claimed 190,000 lives. The World Health Organization warns that because of this new development, the pre-antibiotic era may be on the horizon.

"Immediate action is needed to stop the world from heading towards the pre-antibiotic era in which all achievements made in prevention and control of communicable diseases will be reversed," Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director of WHO South-East Asia Region said in September.

According to WHO estimates, about 10 million deaths per year will be linked to antimicrobial resistance if it goes unchecked.

*bacteria stated as plural of bacterium.