BIOL 1204 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Enterococcus Faecalis, The Dangerous Alliance, Vancomycin
Document Summary
The long-dreaded superbug surfaced on a summer friday in 2002. Staphylococcus aureus, cultured from foot ulcers on a diabetes patient in a detroit dialysis center, had developed resistance to vancomycin, one of the few antibiotics left that reliably kills staph. Doctors rushed the strain to the centers for disease control and. Prevention in atlanta, and nine local and cdc public health officials scoured the dialysis center and tested more than 300 people the patient had come in contact with, collecting samples to see if it had spread. "we dodged another bullet," says clinical microbiologist donald low of the university of toronto. Now a study on page 1569 shows how the microbe became a menace. Linda weigel and fred tenover of cdc and colleagues found that the bug likely acquired the vancomycin-resistance trait from another microbe common in hospital settings, a dangerous alliance that health officials had long feared.
