Losing the Battle of the Bugs
Common bacteria are now so resistant to antibiotics that they can kill. We have no one to blame but ourselves
She could never explain why she had decided to wake him that Thursday afternoon in February. Call it mother's intuition. Susan Canterbury's 2-year-old son, Dalton, had been sleeping for hours, too long. True, the pediatrician had said he had the flu. But something about his deep, deathlike sleep scared her.
When Canterbury woke her son, he was lifeless, so weak he could not hold up his head to eat his favorite ice pop. At 3 p.m. her husband, Daniel, returned from his job at an auto body shop in York, Pa., where the family lives. They decided to take Dalton back to the doctor. A spinal tap showed cloudy fluid, a sign of bacterial meningitis.
In the ambulance on the way to York Hospital, Dalton had a seizure, caused by the infection in the membranes surrounding his brain. The boy needed 24-hour nursing in a pediatric intensive care unit. There was none in York. Dalton's best chance, the emergency physician said, was to fly him immediately to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, 50 miles away. Susan Canterbury suddenly grasped what the doctor was trying to tell her. "You mean," she asked, "he could die?"
For over five decades, the world has conquered infectious diseases like meningitis with a vast array of wonder drugs. Faith in the power of antibiotics to cure everything from pneumonia to postnasal drip has resulted in their becoming one of the most commonly prescribed categories of drugs in the United States. More than 133 million courses of antibiotics are prescribed by doctors each year to nonhospitalized patients. Fully 190 million doses a day are administered in hospitals.
But our wonder weapons are becoming less potent: The bugs have discovered newer, more efficient ways to elude destruction. Bacteria also have more avenues of at-tack: Day-care facilities have thrown youngsters together as never before; hospitalized patients are sicker and more susceptible to infections; modern agriculture, which relies on antibiotics to boost growth and limit disease among cattle, chickens, and other animals, has led to the spread of more dangerous microbes.
But the main demon driving the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens is us. "People don't see a downside to antibiotic use," says Lee Harrison, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins
University. "But there's a major downside: Antibiotic resistance is becoming a public-health nightmare." A new report by the General Accounting Office, delivered to Congress last week, indicates that antibiotic resistance is increasing worldwide--more kinds of bacteria are becoming resistant and they are resistant to multiple drugs. However, the GAO noted, it's impossible to gauge the threat because the needed data do not exist. No federal agency tracks all resistant infections or tallies their human and financial cost--a reality that Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who ordered the report, calls "unacceptable." One estimate puts the financial burden at $30 billion yearly.
Young victims. Even more frightening: The victims are often children, who succumb to common microbes easy to treat just a few years ago. There's Shaunna Littlejohn, 10, now blind and in a vegetative state due to drug-resistant meningitis; Christine Girata, 3, who contracted multidrug-resistant meningitis at 2 months and was left profoundly deaf; Ariana Broadway, 4, who nearly died from a bloodstream infection and pneumonia when she was 2; and, of course, Dalton Canterbury.
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