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Articles on Superbugs vs Antibiotics

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There are no magic bullets in the antibiotic pipeline that will eradicate the superbugs. Alessandro Pinna

New antibiotics: what’s in the pipeline?

Bacteria are one of the most successful colonisers of the planet. They can be found in almost all environments we know – from the deepest oceans to acid lakes, and inside and on our bodies. And the history…
We already know what a world without effective antibiotics would look like - just recall the pre-antibiotic era. Lynae Zebest

A peek at a world with useless antibiotics and superbugs

History not only shows us our errors but also predicts our future. So, we don’t need to speculate about what a world full of superbugs and useless antibiotics would look like, we just need to recall the…
As simple as the procedure sounds, we don’t yet fully understand how faecal transplants work. Image from shutterstock.com

Trading chemistry for ecology with poo transplants

Antibiotics joined our growing arsenal of weapons in the fight against disease over seventy years ago. Their target – the bacterial infections that putrefied our wounds, filled our lungs with pneumonia…
The days when there was always a new antibiotic just around the corner to treat the latest superbug are long gone. Ralph Keating

Unblocking the pipeline for new antibiotics against superbugs

Most experts considering the subject agree that the antibiotic development pipeline is not sufficient by a long shot. The days when there was always a new antibiotic just around the corner to treat the…
Bacteria are like little towns surrounded by walls that have gates for letting supplies in and waste out. Michael Douglas Bramwell

The last stand: the strongest of the superbugs and their antibiotic nemesis

New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, or NDM-1 bacteria as they’re commonly known, are among the most dangerous superbugs to have emerged in recent years. They’re resistant to almost all the antibiotics…
Australia’s food chain has among the lowest rates of antibiotic resistance, but new threats call for stronger monitoring. Eli Duke

The hunt is on for superbugs in Australian animals

Australia has some of the world’s most conservative restrictions on using antimicrobial drugs in livestock. Possibly as a consequence, we have some of the lowest rates in the world of antibiotic resistance…
Only by prescribing antibiotics smarter instead of broader will we keep superbugs at bay. lamentables/Flickr

We can beat superbugs with better stewardship of antibiotics

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are becoming a major problem. Calls to action on increasing rates of resistance have been made by the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC…
Bacteria can quickly adapt and overcome the antibiotics that used to kill them. Image from shutterstock.com

Superbugs, human ecology and the threat from within

At the beginning of the 20th century, around one in three children in countries such as Australia and the United States died of infection before the age of five. But since Howard Florey first described…
Around 180,000 hospital-acquired infections occur in Australia each year. Hospital image from shutterstock.com

Washing our hands of responsibility for hospital infections

Infections, like taxes, are inevitable (to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin). Most are acquired in the community and the dangerous ones are, in the main, very difficult to prevent. But many infections are…

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