Drug Resistance

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

As op-ed commentator Richard E. Chaisson wrote recently, "despite the devastation that TB wreaks, it still is not a global health priority" ("Tuberculosis, the forgotten killer," March 24). Just as it was necessary to eradicate smallpox and combat polio in order to protect ourselves, we also need to step up global efforts to control tuberculosis. That's because any TB case is one sneeze away from spreading to someone else, and in the jet age that puts us all at risk. Until recently, it took five or six weeks to determine if a TB case was drug resistant.

SICK CHICKS or sick people? The livestock industry's massive use of antibiotics has apparently led to strains of bacteria that are resistant to those wonder drugs. And that puts humans increasingly at risk from food-borne infection. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration a month ago finally took action by banning two antibiotics widely used by poultry growers since 1995. The same family of drugs (fluoroquinolones) used to combat food poisoning in humans has shown a dramatic loss of effectiveness in that short period.

Federal health officials warned this week that the nation's hospitals and nursing homes are increasingly at risk from deadly new strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can't be treated with even the strongest antibiotics. So far, the infections have been confined to a small number of the sickest patients in hospital wards, but authorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there is only a "limited window of opportunity" to halt the spread of these "nightmare bacteria" into the wider population.

An experimental AIDS drug taken in combination with a recently approved medication drastically reduced the amount of virus in the blood of patients with a history of drug resistance, according to two international studies published today. The studies reported that up to 18 percent more drug-resistant patients saw the amount of virus in their blood drop to undetectable levels after 24 weeks compared with those taking a standard drug regimen. The results with the experimental drug etravirine give a much-needed boost in the fight against drug resistance among HIV patients, particularly those resistant to the workhorse class of drugs known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NNRTIs.

WASHINGTON -- Physicians should no longer automatically prescribe the anti-viral drug AZT to HIV-infected individuals whose immune systems have begun to deteriorate but who have not developed symptoms of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a federal advisory panel has concluded.The recommendation, completed late Friday, represents a major departure from current medical practice, which has been to give AZT routinely to patients without AIDS symptoms whose immune system cell count has fallen below a certain level.

In one of the first efforts of its kind, Baltimore Health Commissioner Peter L. Beilenson plans to use city vans as "mobile pharmacies" that will deliver AIDS medications to patients in the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods. The program, scheduled to begin Sept. 1 in West Baltimore, is aimed at curbing the spread of viral strains that do not respond to treatment. The problem tends to occur when people begin taking medications but stop taking them regularly. Patients visiting the vans will be encouraged to take their medications in the presence of health workers, a strategy called "directly observed therapy," which has prevented drug-resistant tuberculosis in Baltimore.

As op-ed commentator Richard E. Chaisson wrote recently, "despite the devastation that TB wreaks, it still is not a global health priority" ("Tuberculosis, the forgotten killer," March 24). Just as it was necessary to eradicate smallpox and combat polio in order to protect ourselves, we also need to step up global efforts to control tuberculosis. That's because any TB case is one sneeze away from spreading to someone else, and in the jet age that puts us all at risk. Until recently, it took five or six weeks to determine if a TB case was drug resistant.

One of my close friends is extremely sick with tuberculosis, I thought that tuberculosis was easily cured with antibiotics and was no longer a major health problem.No single infectious disease causes more deaths than tuberculosis (TB).Throughout the world about 1 billion people are infected with tuberculosis; there are 8 million new cases and 3 million deaths annually. The incidence of TB in the United States had been declining for decades until the mid-1930s when an upsurge in cases began.

Detecting tuberculosis and preventing its spread could become easier with a new test that produces results in days rather than weeks and quickly indicates whether patients carry drug-resistant strains, researchers report today. Doctors who studied tuberculosis in Peru said the test could become a major tool in taming a disease that preys mostly on people in developing nations but is also becoming a threat in Europe. TB kills close to 2 million people worldwide each year. "It's taken a long time, but our mission is to basically take this test now that it's been evaluated and implement it in developing countries," Dr. Robert H. Gilman, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said yesterday.

Even as epidemiologists worry about a shrinking arsenal of antibiotics to fight potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria, researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital are betting on another weapon to prevent infections: robots. It sounds more futuristic than it looks: The hospital uses "robot" devices resembling portable air-conditioning units to saturate the air in sealed rooms with hydrogen peroxide, disinfecting all surfaces before converting the potent mist into water vapor. The technology has been used at the hospital more than 4,000 times over the past five years, with promising results.

Living near a livestock farm may increase your risk of acquiring an antibiotic-resistant infection, according to a new study led by researchers from Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health . In reviewing data from the Netherlands, a team of Hopkins and Dutch scientists found that the odds of being exposed to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , or MRSA, are greatest in the southeast region of that European country, an...

Much of Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jason Farley's recent research has focused on an evolving medical crisis: How to stop the spread of bacteria that have adapted immunity to most antibiotics. To stop it the medical community needs to track it. He's found that men recently arrested in Baltimore as well as Hopkins psychiatric patients were far more likely than the general population to be carriers of MRSA, the increasingly common bacteria resistant to many drugs. Now, he's launching a study exploring eradication of MRSA in HIV-positive patients, who, like others with compromised immune systems, are more likely to contract drug-resistant bacterial infections.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

If an envelope arrives in your office stuffed with a mysterious white powder, your chances for survival could be slipping away with each tick of the clock. If that powder proves to be anthrax, for example, and you don't get an effective antibiotic within the first 24 hours , "the chances of survival are slim," said Plamen Demirev, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab. But it can take that long just to grow and identify any pathogens in the envelope, he said.

Infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria are far more widespread than scientists previously thought and might be killing more than 19,000 people a year in the United States, according to a study published today. Of the nine sites that researchers examined, Baltimore had the highest rate of infection by invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA. But health officials said the city was more urbanized than the other sites, which could account for much of the difference.

For the first time, doctors have diagnosed a form of HIV that New York City health officials say has two striking characteristics: It is highly resistant to antiviral drugs in a patient who had never been treated with the medications, and it quickly developed into full-blown AIDS. The infection defied the typical profile by apparently developing into AIDS in a matter of months, officials said. New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said that the strain is one that "is difficult or impossible to treat and which appears to progress rapidly to AIDS."

Every day, Dorothy Murray files into a downtown clinic, raises a glass of grape juice and downs three pills under the eye of a pharmacist. It has been her routine since March, when she left the hospital after nearly dying from an AIDS-related infection that reduced her weight to 70 pounds. "I was an intravenous drug user, but I didn't like taking pills," said Murray, 38, who's back to 100 pounds, which sit well on her diminutive frame. "I figured this was the only way I'd take my medication."

An experimental AIDS drug taken in combination with a recently approved medication drastically reduced the amount of virus in the blood of patients with a history of drug resistance, according to two international studies published today. The studies reported that up to 18 percent more drug-resistant patients saw the amount of virus in their blood drop to undetectable levels after 24 weeks compared with those taking a standard drug regimen. The results with the experimental drug etravirine give a much-needed boost in the fight against drug resistance among HIV patients, particularly those resistant to the workhorse class of drugs known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NNRTIs.