Antibiotics Expert

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years. Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage treatment technology that broadly improves water quality in surrounding environments. Their report appears in ACS’ bi-weekly journal Environmental Science and Technology. Read the rest of this entry »

Most patients who have a history of penicillin allergy can safely take antibiotics called cephalosporins, U.S. researchers say.

Cephalosporins – which are related to penicillin in their structure, uses and effects – are the most frequently prescribed class of antibiotics. Read the rest of this entry »

If doctors used an existing simple lab test on patients with coughs or flu-like symptoms they would be better able to decide which of them might benefit from antibiotics, scientists say. They said prescriptions of expensive antibiotics for respiratory tract infections could be reduced by more than 40% if tests became more commonplace.

The German researchers found that testing for a marker of bacterial infection known as procalcitonin (PCT) helped identify patients whose respiratory tract infections would respond to antibiotics, and stopped others being offered unnecessary drugs. Read the rest of this entry »

A government proposal to slap anti-dumping duties on Chinese and Mexican imports of two key pharma ingredients will push up the prices of common antibiotics like Mox, Augmentin and Sporidex by almost 50%, say their makers.

The commerce ministry has suggested anti-dumping measures on Penicillin-G and 6-APA as provisional duty till it is okayed by the finance ministry. Companies can share their views to the government within 40 days on the imposition before a final duty is determined. However, the drug makers feel that the provisional duty itself would have done the damage, since it will take a few months for the government to arrive at a final decision. Read the rest of this entry »

Boston University researchers have found that taking low levels of antibiotics that don’t quite destroy bacteria can turn them into superbugs. While treating bacteria with insufficient levels of antibiotics produces germs that are cross-resistant to a wide range of antibiotics and when the level of antibiotic is less than lethal, the same reaction causes DNA mutations that are not only survivable, but actually protect the bacteria from numerous antibiotics.

Strains of E. coli and Staphylococcus were used by the researchers to test the effect of low level antibiotics and the scientists observed the effect of five different antibiotics on the bacteria, finding that doses that were less than lethal to the germs made them resistant to other antibiotics.
Read the rest of this entry »