James M. Hughes, MD
[+] Author Affiliations
- KEYWORDS:
- anti-bacterial agents,
- drug approval,
- drug resistance,
- patient safety,
- public health.
Among the most important medicines ever discovered, antimicrobial agents have saved millions of lives and improved the outcomes for countless patients since these drugs were introduced in the early 1930s. However, the effectiveness of these lifesaving resources is at risk. Many medical advances that physicians and patients take for granted—including cancer treatment, surgery, transplantation, and neonatal care—are endangered by increasing antibiotic resistance and a distressing decline in the antibiotic research and development pipeline.1
Antibiotic-resistant infections have been estimated to cost the US health care system more than $20 billion annually and result in more than 8 million additional days in the hospital.2,3 Drug resistance is both a public health and national security threat. Virtually all of the antibiotic-resistant pathogens that exist naturally today can be bioengineered through forced mutation or cloning, and existing pathogens could be genetically manipulated to make them resistant to currently available antibiotics. As underscored by recent reports of infections caused by strains of gram-negative bacteria producing the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1) enzyme, which confers multidrug resistance, antibiotic resistance is also a growing global public health threat./.../
No comments:
Post a Comment