Antibiotic-resistant NDM-1 Is Undermining India's Medical Sector
Some of modern medicine's most heralded interventions -- from
routine surgeries to organ transplants and cancer treatments --
may soon be too dangerous. The viability of these procedures
hinges on physicians' ability to use antibiotics to swiftly
vanquish any bacterial infections that might arise in the course
of treatment. For decades, physicians have been able to choose
from hundreds of different kinds of antibiotics to do the job,
including many powerful "broad spectrum" varieties that
indiscriminately kill a wide range of bacteria. But over the
past two decades, antibiotic drugs have started to fail one by
one, as bacteria with resistance to them have emerged and
spread. Taming the new drug-resistant pathogens requires ever
more toxic, expensive, and time-consuming therapies, such as a
class of last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems, which must
be administered intravenously in hospitals. In the United States
alone, fighting drug-resistan