New Ways to Squash Superbugs

“Superbug Strikes in City” sounds like a horror movie title, but instead it is a headline printed in the October 26, 2007, edition of the New York Post. Twelve days earlier a 12-year-old Brooklyn boy, Omar Rivera, died after a wound he received on the basketball court became infected with methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium that has become resistant to one of the most potent drug classes in the current antibiotic arsenal. The prospect of healthy people contracting an untreatable bacterial infection may have seemed remote a decade ago, but it has now become a reality. In 2007 a research team led by Monina Klevens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that MRSA causes 19,000 deaths every year in the U.S., which is more than HIV/AIDS causes. The number is especially alarming because almost 20 percent of people who contract MRSA die from it, and an increasing number of its victims are young, healthy people who were infected going about everyday activities. The problem was once limited to hospitals or nursing homes, where many people were already vulnerable because of impaired immunity. Even for those who survive, the price of MRSA is high: a patient who contracts it while hospitalized stays an average 10 days longer and costs an additional $30,000. The total annual expenditure on treating MRSA infections in U.S. hospitals is an astounding $3 billion to $4 billion, and staph is just one of the pathogens that are becoming more and more difficult to subdue. Modern medicine is losing the war against disease-causing bacteria that were once considered vanquished, and new approaches to discovering and creating antibiotics are needed to turn the tide.