Resistance is one of many reasons why antibiotic therapy can be ineffective. Efforts to forestall further development of antimicrobial resistance include judicial prescribing of antibiotics, implementing infection-control measures, and developing institutional stewardship of antimicrobial agents. This article, the third and final in a series on antibiotic resistance, discusses selected common infections that have changing epidemiology and/or for which the recommended evaluation and treatment guidelines have been updated.

Urinary tract infection (UTI) is the most frequently diagnosed bacterial infection among community-living women. In the United States, UTIs account for approximately 8 million medical visits per year. Acute cystitis is considered uncomplicated when a symptomatic infection occurs in an otherwise healthy, nonpregnant adult female. Escherichia coli is the causative organism in 80% to 85% of cases of acute cystitis; the causative organisms in the remaining cases are Staphylococcus saprophyticus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Proteus mirabilis.

By Michael Torrice / San Jose Mercury News

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Millions of microbe astronauts will travel into space Tuesday aboard a NASA satellite.

These germs are part of a mission led by the NASA Ames Research Center at California’s Moffett Field to study how floating in space alters a medication’s effectiveness.

On earth, doctors prescribe drugs to cure infections caused by microbes such as bacteria and yeast. The NASA team’s goal is to understand how these germs respond to treatment in outer space.

Previous space experiments have suggested greater amounts of drugs are needed to kill microbes aboard an orbiting spacecraft, said mission manager Bruce Yost.

Yost and his team will measure the extent of these microbes’ resistance to drugs on a new satellite called PharmaSat.

Sam Lister: commentary

Thinking outside the box is a British scientific tradition that is well established in the field of infectious disease. When Edward Jenner, the Gloucestershire doctor and vaccination pioneer, decided to inject pus from a cowpox pustule into the arm of a small boy in 1796, he was ridiculed and condemned for repulsive and ungodly practices.

Reported: 12:48 PM - Apr/29/09

(IsraelNN.com) New groundbreaking research from Israel shows that a common antibiotic has the power to repair genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis, cancer and muscular dystrophy. The Israeli team headed by Prof. Timor Baasov of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, has modified a common, nontoxic antibiotic to fix "nonsense" mutations which occur in genetic diseases and cause the creation of incomplete and non-functional proteins.