Super resistant virus discovered in South Asia

LONDON: Experts fear that people travelling to India and Pakistan and getting medical there might get along a dangerous new mutation that makes some bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics. Some cases have been found in Britain and the United States people who went to these Asian countries.

Experts fear that the NDM-1, a gene mutation, might spread globally and is worrying and ominous.

But experts also feel that it is not as dangerous as the superbug and the flesh-eating bacteria despite it killing many people.

Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center said, “They’re all bad. Is NDM-1 more worrisome than MRSA? It’s too early to judge.”

Carbapenems is an antibiotic that is given when all others fail and these bacteria with the NDM-1 gene are resistant to this antibiotic also. In E. coli and in Klebsiella pneumoniae, the mutation has been found. These two are a frequent culprit in infections like respiratory and urinary.

Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University said, “I would not like to be working at a hospital where this was introduced. It could take months before you got rid of it, and treating individual patients with it could be very difficult.”