Word: staphs
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...course, but the effect is much the same. In 1944, for example, penicillin appeared to be a magic bullet against staphylococcal infections. The problem was, it failed to kill every single bug, and those that survived the onslaught slowly began to multiply. The result: by the 1950s most staph infections had become highly resistant to penicillin. The same fate met penicillin's successors, erythromycin and methicillin; now it appears to be vancomycin's turn...
...venoms and synthesized nontoxic versions of them in the lab. They are talking to drug companies about doing additional research in animals and, eventually, people. If those studies pan out, Moreno says, viper-venom antibiotics could be put in everything from mouthwashes to contact lenses to fight salmonella, cholera, staph and strep...
SUPER DRUG The FDA has okayed Zyvox, the first entirely new type of antibiotic in 35 years. With microbes becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics--including the drug of last resort, vancomycin--the FDA's nod comes just in time: Zyvox is approved for staph bacteria, pneumonia and other serious infections. Now if only docs won't overprescribe it, lest the bugs develop resistance to it as well...
...weapon in the war on "superbugs," mutated bacteria that, over the generations, have grown immune to the old-standby antibiotics. The new drug, Zyvox, is not a cure-all - it attacks only certain forms of bacteria - but in tests it cured two thirds of the patients with strains of staph that are immune to the strongest antibiotics currently available. But although there is hope that Zyvox can put a halt to the mutation process - by blocking growth much earlier in the bacteria's life cycle, it works in a different way than its predecessors - medical experts are taking the news...
...reminders that antibiotics are losing their effectiveness," says TIME science writer Christine Gorman. Years of overuse have sapped the potency of what has been considered the greatest health care breakthrough of the 20th century. According to the Centers for Disease Control, by 1997 half of all hospital-acquired staph infections were resistant to the most common types of antibiotics. So what can doctors do? For starters, they can stop prescribing so many antibiotics - it only accelerates the development of supergerms. Already, hospitals are trying to hold back on the use of vancomycin, the last antibiotic silver bullet left...