With Massive Overuse Of Antibiotics Common, China Becoming Proving Ground For Resistant Disease

[hatrack]

Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country's farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain. Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.

"We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance," said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control. "Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.

"There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world."

Particular alarm has been raised by resistance rates of MRSA in Chinese hospitals, which has more than doubled from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, according to Professor Xiao Yonghong of the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology at Beijing University. Last year researchers found a new strain of MRSA in Chinese pigs imported into Hong Kong and called for urgent new studies into its potential to infect humans after an infection of the new strain was confirmed in Guangzhou, where many of the pigs were farmed.

EDIT

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7168303/China-threatens-world-health-by-unleashing-waves-of-superbugs.html

[On the Road]

1. My Significant Other Was an MD in China

and she takes anitbiotics way at every opportunity, sometimes not finishing the course. She has some azithromycin lying around that had only a five-day course. And she gets sick a lot more often than I do.

[pscot]

2. Hmmmm. A billion people

a secretive, authoritarian regime that suppresses the free flow of information; exotic, drug resistant bugs; what could possibly go wrong?

[NickB79]

3. And a huge number of rural poor living in close proximity with livestock

Livestock that could serve as disease reservoirs to all sorts of fun little bugs. That and markets selling said livestock still alive at markets in urban areas.

Naaa, no possible problems there....