Search for: "penicillin" - 40 articles found

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Article • Transformative technology

Generative AI in healthcare: More than a chatbot

‘Computer, why did the doctor take that MRI scan of my leg? And what did it show?’: Popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence (AI) is already beginning to see practical applications in medical settings. The technology holds immense potential, with benefits for patients, clinicians, and even hospital administration, according to Shez Partovi, MD.

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News • Covid-19 impact on vaccination

Antibiotic resistance could make diphtheria ‘major global threat’ again

Diphtheria – a relatively easily-preventable infection – is evolving to become resistant to a number of classes of antibiotics and in future could lead to vaccine escape, warn an international team of researchers from the UK and India. The researchers, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, say that the impact of Covid-19 on diphtheria vaccination schedules, coupled with a rise in…

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Sponsored • The Heraeus Symposium at DKOU

Challenges of periprosthetic infection

Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is on the increase internationally. In Germany, for example, around 14,500 cases of PJI in hip and knee replacements occur annually. 5,100 of those are caused by multidrug resistant pathogens. ‘Eighty-seven percent of those affected die within five years,’ orthopaedic surgeon Professor Rudolf Ascherl MD pointed out during the Heraeus Symposium held at the…

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News • Direct-from-blood diagnostic

T2Resistance Panel receives CE mark

T2 Biosystems, Inc., a leader in the development and commercialization of medical diagnostic products, and CARB-X, a global non-profit partnership dedicated to accelerating R&D innovation to address the rising global threat of drug-resistant bacteria, announced the granting of a CE mark to the T2Resistance Panel. With the CE mark, T2 Biosystems has met the requirements of the In-Vitro…

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News • Rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance

How P. aeruginosa becomes resistant during CF treatment

Antibiotic-resistant pathogens pose one of the greatest threats to public health worldwide. In the near future, harmless bacterial infections may no longer be treatable and may again become the most common non-natural cause of death. At the same time, the available repertoire of antibacterial agents is becoming increasingly smaller as resistance rates rise.

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Article • Microbiology & hygiene

HAIs are one problem – MDROs another

In view of the increase of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO), the WHO has declared antibiotic resistance one of the biggest threats to global health. MDROs have become a major problem particularly in hospitals. Professor Dr Georg Häcker from the Institute for Microbiology and Hygiene at the University Hospital Freiburg, explains some strategies to prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs).

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News • Fake pills

'Decoy' antibiotics dupe bacteria’s defences

Imperial medical students have helped to devise a new type of ‘decoy’ drug to tackle infections that are resistant to antibiotics. In lab tests on bacterial cultures, the new drug successfully killed a strain of drug-resistant bacteria. It works by delivering two antibiotics, one of which is effectively hidden. When the bacteria fight against the first ‘decoy’ antibiotic, this action…

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News • Sepsis treatment

Bedside testing can prevent antibiotic-induced hearing loss in new-borns

More than a million neonatal deaths worldwide each year are estimated to be due to sepsis. In the UK there are approximately 90,000 admissions to neonatal intensive care units per year. Nearly all these patients receive antibiotic therapy during their hospital stay, but babies with a specific genetic change can suffer irreversible hearing loss as a result. Now, in a collaboration between…

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News • Increasing prevalence

Oral antibiotics may raise risk of kidney stones - especially in kids

Pediatric researchers have found that children and adults treated with some oral antibiotics have a significantly higher risk of developing kidney stones. This is the first time that these medicines have been linked to this condition. The strongest risks appeared at younger ages and among patients most recently exposed to antibiotics. “The overall prevalence of kidney stones has risen by 70…

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News • Enigmatic enzyme

How bacteria recover from antibiotics exposure

Beta-lactam antibiotics, including penicillin, are one of the most widely used classes of antibiotics in the world. Though they’ve been in use since the 1940s, scientists still don’t fully understand what happens when this class of drugs encounters bacteria. Now, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have elucidated how an enzyme helps bacteria rebound from damage inflicted by…

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News • New data

WHO: High levels of antibiotic resistance found worldwide

WHO’s first release of surveillance data on antibiotic resistance reveals high levels of resistance to a number of serious bacterial infections in both high- and low-income countries. WHO’s new Global Antimicrobial Surveillance System (GLASS) reveals widespread occurrence of antibiotic resistance among 500 000 people with suspected bacterial infections across 22 countries.

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Article • Infection - defect - regeneration

Challenges in septic bone surgery

Infections associated with osteosynthesis and prostheses are not to be underestimated: the infection rate is reported to be one to three percent after joint prosthetic surgery and five to 10 percent after osteosyntheses. ‘When you include later infections, the rate is twice as high,’ says Professor Andrej Trampuz, infectologist and Head of the Centre for Septic Surgery at the Centre of…

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News • Going Viral

An unusual 'friend' to help fight ovarian cancer

In some cases, the Lassa virus starts with a fever and general weakness, moving toward headache, muscle pain, possible facial swelling, deafness, and worse. About 15 percent of patients hospitalized with severe cases die. Lassa fever is contagious, endemic in West Africa, and Dr. Anthony van den Pol thinks he can use it to cure ovarian cancer.

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Article • Infections

Carbapenem resistant strains

The increasing numbers of bacteria resistant to the newer generations of antibiotics is a public health problem on a global scale. Bacteria have an extraordinary capacity for adaptation, mutating permanently to overcome the action of our increasingly impotent antimicrobial armamentarium. A situation further aggravated by the use of the powerful ‘large spectrum’ antibiotics, creating further…

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News • Bacteria

3D images of megaenzymes may improve antibiotics

Taking clear pictures of megaenzymes isn’t easy. But it’s definitely worth it. These proteins play an active role in creating many common antibiotics. They are in constant motion, with sections that flip around acrobatically to carry out necessary tasks. Now, for the first time, McGill researchers have been able to take a series of 3D images of a large section from one of these…

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Article • Politics

Antibiotic resistance is a threat to global health

Within 15 years effective antibiotics will run out and, far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, a world in which common infections and minor injuries can kill is a very real possibility for the 21st Century. Geoff Sussman, one of the world’s foremost wound experts has warned that antibiotic resistance is posing the biggest single threat to global health. Report: Mark Nicholls

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Zero percent and other illusions

Professor Tobias Welte MD, President of the 24th International Congress of the European Respiratory Society, gave EH some personal views on the symposium ‘New perspectives in the management of nosocomial pneumonia’. Interview: Ralf Mateblowski

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Controlling antimicrobial resistance

There is no other way: We need a comprehensive approach, with everyone living up to their responsibility to combat this serious health threat in their respective areas. The most basic instinct of every living organism is survival. What selects one organism or species over another, in fact, is its capacity to withstand any kind of adverse condition that comes its way – what scientist Herbert…

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MRSA cases doubled in five years

Infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) doubled at academic medical centers in the U.S. between 2003 and 2008, according to a report published in the August issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

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Superantigens could be behind several illnesses

Superantigens, the toxins produced by staphylococcus bacteria, are more complex than previously believed, reveals a team of researchers from the University of Gothenburg in an article published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications. Their discovery shows that the body’s immune system can cause more illnesses than realised.

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MRSA - Keeping up with the neighbours

The border between Germany and the Netherlands in the so-called EUREGIO region is of no particular importance in the daily life of the people who live there. Every day, thousands commute between towns and cities in both countries, to work, shop or even receive medical treatment. The latter, however, presents Dutch hospitals with a problem.

Positive action in the war against MRSA

The first strain of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) was isolated in the 1960s, and its presence was reported worldwide in the late 1990s. A higher incidence of MRSA was noted in communities, at the dawn of the new millennium, leading to two basic MRSA strains being differentiated - CA-MRSA (community acquired MRSA) and HA-MRSA (healthcare associated MRSA). In clinical practice…

Faster, More Affordable Test Being Developed for Improved MRSA Screening

A rapid, portable, point-of-care test for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), developed by TwistDx based on a new way of detecting DNA, was one of nine products chosen from approximately 250 applications submitted to the Smart Solutions for HCAI programme, an NHS project that aims to identify innovative technologies with the potential to fight hospital bugs.

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Focus: hygiene and nosocomial infections

They are one of the major threats in today's hospital: tiny pathogens that hide out in catheters, in ventilation tubes, on instruments or on the keyboards of medical technological equipment only waiting to attack patients whose immune system is already weakened. This week, EH Online will take a closer look at nosocomial infections, their causes, their effects and the available ways and means to…

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Appendicitis complicated by chickenpox

Surgeons Sergey V Stonogin, specialist in infectious cases, Eugeny V Dvorovenko, Head of Emergency Surgery, and Vladimir A Chaplin, endoscopy specialist - report on results from their study to assess the most effective, safe combination of antibiotics to treat patients with acute appendicitis complicated by chickenpox

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