The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, has announced the newest tool in its arsenal against antibiotic resistance, AR. The Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative is providing $264 million to fund the CDC's comprehensive approach to implement the National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria -- CARB. The CDC identifies 18 drug resistant threats to the US, and categorizes them as urgent, serious, or concerning.
CRE is a relatively new antibiotic resistant bacteria that has health officials particularly concerned. The CDC describes the urgent situation, Untreatable and hard-to-treat infections from CRE bacteria are on the rise among patients in medical facilities. CRE have become resistant to all or nearly all the antibiotics we have today. Almost half of hospital patients who get bloodstream infections from CRE bacteria die from the infection."
A CRE surveillance study, just published in the Journal of American Medicine Association, found that while CRE is still less prevalent than antibiotic resistant MRSA, or C. diffcile, it has become more common in a short amount of time" explains Dr. Mary Hayden, associate professor of pathology at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago.
Although the surveillance study found most people contract CRE in the hospital, public health experts warn that entobacteriacae -- a common component in daily life -- could create catastrophic situations if CRE begins to spread outside medical facility environments. Dr. Hayden says, If CRE gets into the community and starts causing regular old urinary tract infections in otherwise healthy people, it will have a significant impact because we don't have agents to treat those things. If we look at what has happened with other similar antibiotic resistant organisms, we can see what will happen with this unless we do something now. I think we learned from those situations that these problems can spread very rapidly."
CARB is a contemporary goal specific plan of action that identifies five core actions, according to the CDC. It is designed to slow the development of resistant bacteria and prevent the spread of resistant infections. In addition, the initiative goals are intended to strengthen the National One-Health surveillance efforts to combat resistance, to advance development and use rapid innovative diagnostic testing to identify and characterize resistant bacteria. CARB includes measures to accelerate basic and applied research and development for new antibiotics, therapies and vaccines, as well as to improve international collaboration toward prevention, surveillance, control, research, and development.
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