Antibiotics Losing Their Healing Punch More And More Often Rise Of Drug-Resistant Bacteria Worrying Disease Experts

The middle-aged woman was desperately ill. Brought by an anxious daughter to the emergency room at Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., she was nearly in a coma, her brain swelling with meningitis.

Doctors swiftly put her on two antibiotics that for years have been highly effective against the disease. But she failed to improve, and lab tests showed she had a form of meningitis that resists both drugs.

As precious hours ticked by, physicians finally switched to one of the last lines of defense in the antibiotic arsenal, vancomycin. Still the woman got sicker. After five days in the hospital, she died.

“It’s kind of an impotent feeling,” said Dr. Alan Morgenstein, an infectious-disease specialist and one of the physicians who tried to save the woman. “You know what’s going on but you can’t do anything about it.”

Half a century after the medical breakthrough of penicillin, antibiotics are losing their almost miraculous power to heal pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis and other dangerous infections. The medications are being thwarted by “superbugs” - bacteria with the ability to resist antibiotics.

An estimated 13,000 Americans die each year from drug-resistant bacteria, while others who survive face lengthy hospitalization and treatment with more expensive, more toxic drugs. And experts warn of the likely emergence of an untreatable “Andromeda strain” that could touch off epidemics in hospitals and other facilities.

“Antibiotics are very rapidly slipping away as a strategy to combat infectious diseases,” said Dr. Stephen Ostroff, associate director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.

“Once we lose the ability of antibiotics to treat infections, we’ll certainly see a resurgence of these diseases,” he said. “You just have to think back to how things were a century ago. A lot of infections caused a lot of fairly severe complications when they weren’t treatable, including death.”

Consider:

Pneumonia, which each year kills an estimated 1 million people worldwide, including 25,000 Americans, is becoming steadily more resistant to penicillin, an inexpensive drug that kept it at bay for more than five decades.

Mutant forms of tuberculosis, which has resurged sharply in the United States in recent years, can resist as many as 11 drugs and has become a major threat to people who also have the AIDS virus, hastening their deaths.

Millions of American children suffer from inner-ear infections often caused by drug-resistant microbes, at a cost of billions of dollars in lengthy treatments and parents’ lost wages from repeated trips to the doctor.

The first reported outbreak in California of a vancomycin-resistant intestinal bacteria last year prompted ominous warnings from health officials that the germ could pass its drug-fighting genes to a far more dangerous bacteria that could cause perhaps thousands of deaths in the state.

Antibiotics still can knock down most infections in most people, experts say. But in a growing number of cases, bacteria can withstand multiple drugs. And in some instances, germs cannot be stopped by any medicine.

“The number of deaths in humans due to drug resistance is going to get worse before it gets better,” said Dr. Stuart B. Levy of Tufts University Medical School in Boston, author of “The Antibiotic Paradox: How Miracle Drugs Are Destroying the Miracle.”

Since 1942, when a new drug called penicillin saved scores of burn victims from a Boston nightclub fire, antibiotics have been hailed as the greatest therapeutic discovery in history.

Before such drugs, hospital wards were packed with people - most of them young - doomed to chronic complications or early death from pneumonia, typhoid fever, meningitis, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, syphilis and other bacterial ailments.