What Do You Think?

[troach]

Back when I was learning a little about various diseases in various animals there was one comforting constant most natural ‘bugs’ (as the article calls it) do not / can not infect an organism of a different species. Be it animals to people or one type of bacteria to another. Being how easily this ‘bug’ appears to jump across species boundaries, it sort of makes one wonder where this thing really came from random mutation or something else.



copied from:
http://www.canada.com/health/Indian+superbug+spreads+Canada/4862084/story.html



Indian superbug spreads to Canada
By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News
May 30, 2011





A drug-resistant superbug that's spreading globally has been found in two Toronto-area people — a woman who went abroad for a controversial MS treatment and a man who hadn't travelled outside Ontario in more than a decade.


The latter case is believed to be the first time the organism, dubbed NDM-1, has been contracted in Canada — a finding a leading infectious disease expert called "alarming."


A handful of cases of NDM-1 — New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase — has been reported in B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec in people who picked up the infection while in hospitals in India or in Pakistan.


The NDM-1 gene enables bacteria to be resistant to "big gun" penicillin-type drugs called carbapenems, says Dr. Susan Poutanen, a medical microbiologist and infectious disease physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.


The gene sits on a plasmid — a tiny chunk of DNA — and can move from one bacterial species to another. "This plasmid often also carries resistant genes to other classes of drugs," Poutanen says — meaning that, if people get sick with NDM-1 producing bacteria causing significant infections, there are only one or two drugs, at best, to treat it.


The gene can jump into common bacteria, including E. coli, that can cause a spectrum of infections — including hospital-acquired pneumonias and urinary tract infections that, in serious cases, can lead to septic shock and even death. The strains that harbour the gene tend to be multi-drug resistant, meaning doctors could be faced with a severe pneumonia, with virtually no remedy to administer to patients.


"I think it's pretty alarming," said Dr. Gerry Wright, scientific director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Hamilton. If NDM-1 is spreading between people in Canada, it would mean "more death and more disease and more hospital stays, and more extended challenges for the clinical community."


There's no way of knowing right now whether that's happening, he said. But the report "raises a pretty significant red flag that we need to be looking for it," Wright said. "Is this just a one-off, or is this the harbinger of things to come?"


In hospitals, it can spread between patients via the hands of health-care workers or contaminated equipment, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.


Now endemic throughout India and Pakistan, NDM-1 is spreading worldwide because of travel, medical tourism and its ability to move stealthily between bacteria, Poutanen's team wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.


The report describes the case of an 86-year-old man admitted to a Toronto hospital and rehab centre for a stroke: he later tested positive for NDM-1. He hadn't travelled outside of southwestern Ontario for the past 10 years; none of his family members or friends had travelled to India or to any known endemic regions. All the patients on the ward he had been admitted to were swabbed. No one had any NDM-1-producing organisms.


"It looks like we have one — albeit it's just one — locally acquired case of NDM-1," Poutanen said. The man had been hospitalized multiple times before for other health problems, and Poutanen says the best guess is that he picked it up in hospital. But, "where exactly the transmission occurred is unknown."


She stressed that the superbug poses no threat to public health.


"It's not something that we believe is a concern at all for the community at large," Poutanen said.


But she said hospitals and other health-care institutions need to be able to identify the bugs and ensure proper infection-control precautions are taken if detected to prevent their spread.


In the second case, a 71-year-old woman tested positive for NDM-1 after travelling to India in September for a controversial multiple sclerosis treatment — so-called "liberation" therapy that isn't offered in Canada. Many MS patients have gone abroad for the procedure.


In both cases, the people tested positive for NDM-1 but neither showed symptoms of infection.


In an unusual twist, the NDM-1 gene was found in common gut bacteria normally not associated with the superbug.


Health officials should consider making NDM-1 reportable, Poutanen said.


"We don't have a handle on the exact numbers because it's not currently tracked," she said.


The number appears to be small based on what has been reported so far, but Poutanen said that with mandatory reporting, "we'd have a better feel for exactly the number we're dealing with."