Breitbart.com reports: “The World Health Organisation called on health authorities around the globe to monitor a multi-drug resistant superbug that surfaced in South Asia and spread to Britain.

The WHO said research published in The Lancet medical journal on August 11 identified a new gene that enables some types of bacteria to be highly resistant to almost all antibiotics.

‘While multi-drug resistant bacteria are not new and will continue to appear, this development requires monitoring and further study to understand the extent and modes of transmission, and to define the most effective measures for control,’ it added in a statement.

It underlined that the whole health care chain, including patients, hospitals, governments, laboratories, pharmaceutical firms and vetenarians, had ‘to be alert to the problem of antimicrobial resistance and take appropriate action.’

Multi-drug resistant bacteria generally ‘constitute a growing and global public health problem,’ the UN health agency noted.

It underlined the value of hospital infection control measures to limit the spread of such resistant strains and prudent use of antibiotics to reduce the generation of resistant bacteria.

Rigorous use of such measures, including extensive hand washing in health care facilities, had proved successful in controlling multidrug-resistant bacteria in many countries, according to the global health watchdog.

Indian doctors warned earlier this year about the threat from a new multi-drug resistant superbug known as NDM-1 — months before the British study — warning that it could spread worldwide with patients.

The Lancet study said plastic surgery patients had carried a new class of superbug from South Asia to Britain…” (Matthew 24:7; Revelation 6:7, 8 – see the next two warnings of the largest plague in history.)

The Globe and Mail reports: “At least two Canadians have become infected with a dangerous new superbug from India that is spreading around the world, partly due to medical tourism.

The superbug, which is resistant to almost all antibiotics, has Canadian public-health experts bracing for outbreaks.

‘There will be others. It’s just a matter of time,’ said Dylan Pillai, a medical microbiologist at the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion. ‘It’s just the nature of the beast.’

Researchers reported dozens of cases of British, Indian and Pakistani patients who contracted infections caused by bacteria harbouring an enzyme called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Of 29 Britons, more than half had recently travelled to India or Pakistan and 14 had been admitted to hospitals in the subcontinent, where the drug-resistant enzyme originated, including for kidney transplants and cosmetic surgery.

Two cases have been confirmed among Canadians who spent time in India. In addition, the drug-resistant infection has been found in patients from the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia…”

The Guardian.co.uk reports: “Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we’re going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it’s going to get nasty.

Just 65 years ago, David Livermore’s paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn’t go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.

The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. ‘Is this the end of antibiotics?’ it asked.

Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level. Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM 1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems. The paper revealed that NDM 1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery.

‘In many ways, this is it,’ Walsh tells me. ‘This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.’…”