Super Bug?

The “mutant super bug” has been in the limelight during the past week.  The background of this story is well known. Along years, natural selection has equipped many of the human and animal pathogens with resistance genes to major antibiotics. This phenomenon is particularly worrying in case of multidrug-resistant strains of Gram-negative bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella, Escherichia coli, Yersinia pestis, Klebsiella and Shigella.  Colistin was one of the last antibiotics effective against these multidrug-resistant bacteria.

In 2015, an Escherichia coli strain provided with a  resistance gene to Colistin was identified in China and then in Europe and Canada. In early May 2016,  the Multidrug Resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network (MRSN) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Pennsylvania identified the Colistin-resistance gene in a clinical sample from a urinary tract infection collected from a patient hospitalized  in a military treatment facility. Epidemiologists – and subsequently the media – have interpreted this event as the herald of a dreadful wave of pan-drug resistant bacteria. “The fear is that this could spread to other bacteria and create the bacterium that would be resistant to everything,” stated Dr. Beth Bell, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.

As the Colistin-resistant  Escherichia coli was detected, the pharma industry has immediately called for cooperation among governments and companies to create incentives to revitalize research and development of new antibiotics. It is difficult to imagine a worse communication strategy. Now, even the most optimistic and confident consumer will suspect a hidden agenda behind the super bug  alarm.

It is probably true that there are too few antibiotics under development today, but we all know that the “super bug” threat cannot be met only- and chiefly -  by allocating more resources on pharma research. Colistin-resistant  strain of Escherichia coli were previously discovered in livestock in China and  in pig breeding farms in the US.  Although intensive farming is not the sole cause of antibiotics resistance, it is its major cause at global scale, and it is out of discussion that either we are able to address this cause, notably in Asia and China, or all our efforts to contain antibiotic resistance are destined to fail.

Finally, there is something morbid in the exceptionalism used by media to inform the public about this new “superbug”. When FORBES does not find a better way to describe  the discovery  of a Colistin-resistance bacterium in a clinical sample than saying that this discovery was  “like finding a vampire who is no longer affected by sunlight”, this is  probably a sign that something is going wrong in public health communication.