Antibiotic Resistance and Australia's New Superbug

At current UK government estimates, we could see up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050 from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, taking us back to the days when people died of simple infections.
Veterinary and agricultural use of antibiotics has been widely blamed for the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, in the efforts of promoting growth or preventing sickness.
Doctors have also been accused of over-prescription with their patients, or being quick to prescribe the drugs “just in case” without first receiving test confirmation of a bacterial infection.
The hospital environment may also be a risk with a new strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria being revealed as one of the top five bacteria involved in hospital acquired infections, causing pneumonia, wound infections and urinary tract infections: Klebsiella pneumoniae.
The report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states, "Klebsiella pneumoniae is now recognised as an urgent threat to human health because of the emergence of multidrug-resistant strains associated with hospital outbreaks and hypervirulent strains associated with severe community-acquired infections."
Dr Kathryn Holt from the University of Melbourne says it is inevitable that virulence and resistance genes in different strains of the bacteria are poised to converge, which could lead to a massive number of serious untreatable infections.
And now that the world is so much more mobile than ever, Australian leaders in infection control have advised that standard admission questions include a patient’s travel history.
“With so much international air travel taking place, the risk of coming into contact with infectious diseases greatly increases,” said Professor Peter Collignon from the Australasian College of Infection Prevention and Control.
“Whether it be MERS, SARS or some other multi-resistant super bug, if we have in place a routine which asks people where they have travelled in the past month, we will we have a much better chance of isolating potential diseases and putting in place effective infection control.”