Resistance to the Antibiotic of Last Resort Is Silently Spreading
Just over a year after they were discovered in China, bacteria that can fend off colistin are being found all across the world.
The alarm bells sounded on November 18, 2015.
Antibiotic resistance is usually a slow-moving crisis, one of the reasons its danger can be hard to convey. One by one, over the years, the drugs used to fight the most stubborn infections have fallen by the wayside as bacteria have evolved resistance to them. For certain infections, the only drug left is colistin. Then on November 18, 2015, scientists published a in the British medical journal : A single, easily spreadable gene makes the bacteria that carry it resistant to colistin, our antibiotic of last resort.
