From owner-diagnostics@net.bio.net Wed Mar 18 22:00:00 1998 Path: biosci!biosci!not-for-mail From: xx Newsgroups: bionet.diagnostics Subject: Antimicrobial resistance TV program, 8pm March 19 Date: 19 Mar 1998 01:09:08 -0800 Organization: xx Lines: 66 Sender: daemon@net.bio.net Approved: odonnell@sasa.gov.uk Distribution: world Message-ID: <6eqnbk$av@net.bio.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: net.bio.net Just a note to those who are interested that 'Quantum', the ABC TV science program, will air an half-hour special on antibiotic resistance at 8pm on Thursday, March 19, 1998. The program talks to a number of researchers in the field, including Stuart Levy in Boston and John Turnidge in Adelaide, and takes a hard look at the animal link to the rise of resistance, Below is the synopsis from our website. Hope thos of you that are able to watch will. Sincerely, Wilson da Silva Journalist ABC TV Science Unit ---------------------------------------------------- ``PASSING THE BUG ... The end of antibiotics? 8.00 pm, Thursday March 19, 1998 We are running out of antibiotics. The microbes are fighting back, they have developed resistance to our most powerful biological weapons - and they are invading our hospitals. Already, microbes resistant to the most powerful and most toxic antibiotic, Vancomycin, have sprung up in European and American hospitals. Once in the bloodstream of seriously ill patients, they have a 60 per cent chance of dying. Doctors can do little else than watch and hope that a patient's own immune system will fight it off. In 1994, this microbe -- VRE -- arrived in Australia; there have been 60 cases around the country, six of them fatal. Doctors are so worried they are isolating patients with any hint of the bug, even if they are not very ill. In Japan, the doomsday scenario that had long been feared is emerging: the golden staph germ that used to plague hospitals and kill 80 per cent of its victims once in the bloodstream has returned. And it is resistant to just about every antibiotic, including Vancomycin. Within months, cases of the superbug sprang up in Michigan and New Jersey. Quantum talks to patients who have lived the nightmare of fighting resistant infections in Australia -- a man whose leg had to be amputated to try and stop a resistant golden staph infection; a woman who was infected with VRE and treated as a pariah by other hospitals, who would not take her. We look at the link between the use of antibiotics in animals and the rise of resistance in humans. Two thirds of antibiotics in Australia are used on livestock -- not to treat sick animals, but as growth promoters. Researchers now conclude that their widespread use in creating a reservoir of resistant bugs that then attack humans. The data convinced the European Union to ban come antibiotics as growth promoters, and now the World Health Organisation has come out against them. But Australian authorities deny there is a link. Microbiologists tell Quantum that the evidence is clear, the practice is madness, and a ban is needed. We talk to doctors who feel pressurized by patients to prescribe antibiotics, to nurses who deal with the rising number of infections day-to-day. Quantum will for the first time reveal the extent of the problem in Australia: how the number of infections is running at tens of thousands per year. It is a silent public health emergency. It may well be that, only 54 years after penicillin arrived to save us from scourges like tuberculosis and pneumonia, that we are now entering a world where we will have to do without antibiotics. c 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation .