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Study exposes how bacteria resist antibiotics

in.reuters.com

Study exposes how bacteria resist antibiotics

Scientists have discovered how bacteria fend off a wide range of antibiotics, and blocking that defense mechanism could give existing antibiotics more power to fight dangerous infections.

Researchers at New York University said on Thursday that bacteria produce certain nitric oxide-producing enzymes to resist antibiotics.

Drugs that inhibit these enzymes can make antibiotics much more potent, making even deadly superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA succumb, they said.

“Developing new medications to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA is a huge hurdle, associated with great cost and countless safety issues,” said Evgeny Nudler of NYU Langone Medical Center, whose study appears in the journal Science.

“Here, we have a short cut, where we don’t have to invent new antibiotics. Instead, we can enhance the activity of well-established ones, making them more effective at lower doses,” he said in a statement.

Drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, killing about 19,000 people a year in the United States.

Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress.

“Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview.

We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.”

He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said.

Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs.

He thinks a compound in this class could be made to reduce the amount of nitric oxide bacteria can produce, reducing their ability to resist antibiotics. That would mean researchers would not need to discover new antibiotics.

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Studies show one dose of H1N1 vaccine may be enough

in.reuters.com

Studies show one dose of H1N1 vaccine may be enough

Two studies published on Thursday confirmed that a single dose of swine flu vaccine can protect people from the new pandemic H1N1 virus — welcome news to global health officials who had worried that people might need two doses.

Australian vaccine maker CSL Inc. released new data showing its vaccine got what would be considered a protective immune response with a singe dose, and Swiss drug maker Novartis presented a study confirming a report from last week showing its vaccine worked at an even lower dose when boosted with an immune system compound called an adjuvant.

Both studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, may lay to rest fears about the logistical nightmare of trying to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people globally with two doses of H1N1 vaccine — given a month apart — in addition to a single recommended dose of seasonal influenza vaccine.

Last week China’s Sinovac also reported its vaccine protected patients with a single dose.

The new H1N1 strain of flu, declared a pandemic in June, could eventually infect one third of the world’s population, or 2 billion people, according to the World Health Organization.

Because it is a new strain, infectious disease experts had said people would likely need two doses to get full immunity against the virus. They are rushing to put in place vaccine programs as the weather cools in the Northern Hemisphere and the traditional flu season starts.

About 20 pharmaceutical companies including Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit are also racing to develop H1N1 vaccine as governments scramble to secure supplies.

The United States hopes to vaccinate 160 million Americans by the beginning of December.

NASAL SPRAY READY

Also on Thursday, MedImmune said its inhaled vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 virus could be ready to start shipping to the U.S. government by the end of September.

MedImmune’s Dr. Raburn Mallory said the company has submitted safety data for its nasal spray swine flu vaccine to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“There are no red flags there. We think we can have 5 million doses ready to distribute at the end of September,” Mallory said in an interview. U.S. officials had not expected vaccination to begin until mid-October.

The company has 5 million doses in spray devices now, a company spokeswoman said, adding that a more conservative estimate would be that 3.5 million doses could be sent out by the end of September.

U.S. health officials said they started testing swine flu vaccines in pregnant women this week and were scheduled on Friday to report on results of some of the tests being done on various swine flu vaccines for the U.S. market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is licensing H1N1 vaccines as if they are a simple reformulation of the seasonal flu vaccine. This does not require clinical tests, but the National Institutes of Health is running clinical tests anyway, to be sure it is safe and to find the best dose.

Governments in Europe have started to take delivery of H1N1 swine flu vaccines but are awaiting a license from European authorities before they can start mass vaccinations.

“The immune response to all these vaccines is a very high response, whatever type of vaccine it is, whether it is adjuvanted or non-adjuvanted,” Thomas Lonngren, executive director of the European Medicines Agency or EMEA, told a news briefing.

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Vaccines could halve sickle-cell deaths in Africa

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Vaccines could halve sickle-cell deaths in Africa

Vaccination against bacterial infections using vaccines readily available in developed countries could save the lives of thousands of children with sickle-cell anemia in Africa, researchers said on Thursday.

Tom Williams, an expert in tropical diseases from the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), said 90 percent of children born with sickle-cell anemia in Africa die before they are diagnosed and can get treatment, and half of those lives could be saved if sufferers were protected from bacterial infections.

“The problem here in Africa is that there is hardly anyone doing any screening,” Williams said. “So, as a result, most of the children in Africa who are born with sickle-cell anemia are dead before they are even diagnosed.”

Experts estimate that sickle-cell anemia kills more children in Africa than HIV, Williams said, but while HIV commands vast attention from the international community sickle-cell anemia is “virtually invisible.”

In a study conducted in rural Kenya and published in the Lancet medical journal, Williams and colleagues at the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust program in Kilifi screened almost 40,000 admissions to hospital and identified 2,000 cases of bacterial infection.

While in the general population fewer than three in 1,000 children were found to have sickle cell anemia, this figure increased more than 20-fold — to more than 60 per 1,000 — for children admitted to hospital with bacterial infections.

Sickle-cell anemia affects millions of people worldwide, but more than 80 percent of cases are in Africa, where around 200,000 children are born with the disease every year.

It is a genetic disease in which red blood cells deform into a sickle shape and cluster, blocking blood flow and causing pain, vulnerability to infections and organ damage.

The findings confirm that, just as in richer nations, African children with sickle-cell anemia are at huge risk of bacterial infections because the disease hampers blood flow and causes episodes of acute anemia, Williams said.

The most common causes of bacterial infection among children with sickle-cell were Streptococcus pneumoniae (41 percent of cases) and Haemophilus influenzae type b (12 percent of cases).

Vaccines against both — a pneumococcal vaccine and another called Hib — are given routinely in the United States and Europe, but have been slow getting to Africa because funds have largely been focused on other priorities.

Dan Thomas of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva, said his group provides the Hib vaccine, which is made by a range of drug companies, to 35 African nations as part of a 5-in-1 shot.

GAVI has also introduced a pneumococcal vaccine made by Wyeth, a U.S. drug company which is being bought by Pfizer, to Rwanda and Gambia, and is “working on rolling an improved pneumococcal vaccine out across Africa in the next few years,” he said.

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