SuperbugsNevada woman killed by superbug resistant to every known antibiotic

Published 13 January 2017

A 70-yer old woman in Nevada has died after a superbug which infected her proved resistant to every available type of antibiotic. The woman was already infected in India, where she had an extended stay, and was hospitalized there several times. She returned to Nevada in August 2016. She was admitted to a hospital shortly after her return, but died a month later after treatment with twenty-six different antibiotics was futile.

A 70-yer old woman in Nevada has died after a superbug which infected her proved resistant to every available type of antibiotic.

The woman was already infected in India, where she had an extended stay, and was hospitalized there several times. She returned to Nevada in August 2016.

STAT News reports that she was admitted to a hospital shortly after her return, but died a month later after treatment with twenty-six different antibiotics was futile.

“It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States… and was not effective,” Dr Alexander Kallen, a medical officer at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told the health news site Stat.

“I think it’s concerning,” he added. “We have relied for so long on just newer and newer antibiotics. But obviously the bugs can often [develop resistance] faster than we can make new ones.”

Doctors said that a few years before she died, the woman had broken her right femur during her time in India. 

Her femur, and part of her hip, were later infected with CRE (carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae) — a bacteria commonly found in the gut, and which has developed a resistance to a strand of antibiotic often used as a last resort.

CDC reports that a specific enzyme, New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM), which makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of antibiotics, was detected in one of her wounds.

The federal agency said it considers antimicrobial resistance “one of the most serious health threats” currently facing the United States.

Microbiology expert Professor Laura Piddock from the University of Birmingham, told Stat:: “Despite such multi-drug resistant bacteria being rare, this report is a cautionary tale of the dire outcome for some patients when potentially useful drugs are not available. 

In circumstances such as this where doctors are faced with the inability to treat a life threatening infection they need the flexibility to use antibiotics licensed for use in other countries and shown to be active in the laboratory against the patient’s infecting bacterium.”

Professor Nigel Brown, a spokesperson for the Microbiology Society, said in a statement: “This sad case is a wake-up call for the isolation and development of new classes of antibiotic.

He added: “There is also a need for international agreements on the use of antibiotics, [since] too many countries allow medically-important antibiotics to be self-prescribed or to be used in agriculture.”