BACTERIA RESISTANT TO ANTIBIOTICS

EIN News says, "A Looming Drug Crisis: The Dearth of New Antibiotics. In recent years, efforts to combat drug-resistant bacteria have focused on the immediate goal of reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections. But now global health officials face an approaching crisis: the number of different antibiotics available to treat such infections when they do occur is dwindling because pharmaceutical companies have neglected to invest in the development of new types of drugs. (time.com)".

This is baloney! The reporter appears to be castigating pharmaceutical companies, for whatever agenda he may have in mind, perhaps related to government health care. Pharmaceutical company management is not stupid. When they see an obvious market, such as control of antibiotic resistant bacteria, they make every attempt to fill it. They do so for the profit motive, which is the basis of their business.

We have known about the developing resistance of pathogenic bacteria to antibiotics for at least 10 years, and the pharmaceutical industry has been doing a good job in introducing new antibiotics, which are effective against the new resistant bacteria. However, this is an ongoing problem, because bacteria are able to modify their metabolism to again develop resistance to the new antibiotics. This is similar to the ability of influenza viruses to modify their genetic program to avoid being inhibited by flu vaccines. This is why the Center of Disease Control has a continuing problem of trying to predict what form of flu virus to protect against each year.

Recent research on the basic chemistry of antibiotic resistance has shown that nitric oxide is an integral part in the resistance development. This work is being continued in an effort to determine how nitric oxide in that particular genomic system can be removed, while also not affecting necessary nitric oxide for other genomic operations.