A recent small outbreak of a drug-resistant superbug, NDM-1, which is resistant to most antibiotics, has been reported in the UK, US, India and other countries. The bacterium has a special enzyme that can enter and survive in the mitochondria of the DNA of most bacteria, which makes the bacteria widely resistant to drugs, and has been dubbed by the Western media as the “New Delhi” bacterium because it was first discovered in plastic surgeons and surgeons traveling to India for medical treatment. “New Delhi” bacteria. In fact, drug-resistant types of bacteria are not new; they have always existed and evolved strong resistance as humans misuse antibiotics, and in this particular game, humans are the ones behind the superbugs. Superbug is not really the name of a bacterium, but of a group of bacteria that have in common a strong resistance to almost all antibiotics. Over time, the list of superbugs has grown longer and longer, including ultra-broad-spectrum enzyme-producing Escherichia coli, multi-drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, multi-drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, pan-resistant Mycobacterium pneumoniae, and pan-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, among others. The most famous of the superbugs is a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA for short). MRSA is now extremely common, causing infections of the skin, lungs, blood, and joints, and it was the very bacterium that Fleming used to deal with when he stumbled upon penicillin back in the day. However, as antibiotics became more widely available, some S. aureus began to develop resistance, producing penicillinases that destroyed the effectiveness of the penicillin.MRSA resistance developed very rapidly, and only two years after Western scientists used a semi-synthetic penicillin (i.e., mecloxacillin) to kill resistant S. aureus in 1959, mecloxacillin-resistant S. aureus appeared in the United Kingdom, and by the late 1980s, MRSA had become the most common form of the bacterium. By the late 1980s, MRSA had become one of the most prevalent hospital-acquired infections in the world (and the number one of the world’s three most intractable infectious diseases), and vancomycin is the only drug proven to be effective against MRSA globally. The latest superbug to emerge is called NDM-1 Medical research institutes at Cardiff University, the UK’s Health Protection Agency and the University of Madras, India, have discovered a particular bacterium in a number of patients who had traveled to India to undergo surgical procedures. According to an article published in the medical journal Acupuncture, the bacterium is called New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase 1 (NDM-1), which contains a rare enzyme that can exist in the DNA of E. coli bacteria and thus make them widely resistant to drugs, which makes it very difficult to cure or even kill a person after being infected. NDM-1 is a very dangerous superbug because of its ability to replicate, spread quickly and be prone to genetic mutation, which makes it a very dangerous superbug in the current situation of misuse of antibiotics. “Superbugs” can spread widely Superbug NDM-1 can cross almost different bacterial species, that is, it can be widely present in the NDA mitochondria of various bacteria. The NDM-1 superbug is found in various bacterial species as a DNA structure, hence the name plasmid. It can replicate and move freely in bacteria, which gives this germ the amazing potential to spread and mutate, and is resistant to all antibiotics except tigecycline and polymyxin. The researchers are determining the prevalence of NDM-1 germs infecting these patients. The researchers found that an increase in NDM-1 infections, including some fatal cases, had already been seen in the UK in 2009. David Livermore, an expert from the U.K.’s Health Protection Agency who was involved in the study. Livermore said that most of the NDM-1 infections were associated with people who had traveled to or received treatment in South Asian countries such as India. At least 17 of the 37 patients studied in the U.K. had traveled to India or Pakistan in the past year, and at least 14 of them had received treatment in either country, including kidney transplants, bone marrow transplants, dialysis, childbirth, burn treatments, or cosmetic surgery. However, there were also 10 cases of infection in the UK in patients who had not received any overseas treatment at all. Current research has found that E. coli infections carrying NDM-1 cause urinary tract infections and blood poisoning in many patients. Antibiotic Misuse Shapes Superbugs The discovery and purification of penicillin is one of the greatest discoveries in human history. Since penicillin was applied to clinic in 1941, tens of thousands of antibiotics have been discovered and more than 200 antibiotics have been applied to clinic. The widespread use of antibiotics has saved countless lives, and to this day antibiotics are still an indispensable part of a doctor’s treatment of infections. However, with the use of antibiotics, many of the bacteria that cause human diseases have become resistant to its rivals. Hospitals where antibiotic use is more concentrated are breeding grounds for the superbug MRSA. The bacteria silently spread among patients, healthcare workers, and patients, and can be present in the human body for months. The U.S. Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that MRSA accounted for 2.4% of all S. aureus infections in 182 hospitals in 1975, rising to 24.8% in 1991, especially in teaching hospitals and central hospitals with more than 500 beds, because these hospitals have more chances of MRSA infections, and drug-resistant strains of the bacterium can be brought into the hospital both by infected patients and due to the misuse of Antibiotics can be produced in hospitals. The superbug NDM-1 has spread from patients in India’s orthopedic and surgical hospitals. China: 80,000 people die every year due to the abuse of antibiotics At an international conference held in early August, the head of the Ministry of Health’s National Bacterial Drug Resistance Monitoring Network pointed out that China’s antimicrobial drug resistance rate remains high, the top five causes of nosocomial infections in the drug-resistant situation is worsening, and the rate of clinical isolation of “super-resistant bacteria” is increasing. This indicates that it is increasingly difficult for existing drugs to deal with super-resistant bacteria. The problem of antibiotic resistance is particularly prominent. According to the 2006-2007 National Bacterial Drug Resistance Monitoring Results of the Ministry of Health, the annual utilization rate of antibacterial drugs in hospitals is as high as 74%. And no other country in the world uses antibiotics on such a large scale. In developed countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., the antibiotic utilization rate in hospitals is only 22% to 25%. China’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Department has long been the hardest hit by antibiotic abuse, and years of statistics from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the Changning District Central Hospital in Shanghai show that penicillin resistance has now reached almost 100%. In contrast, the use of antibiotics among hospitalized patients in China is as high as 70%, with almost everyone in surgery using antibiotics at a rate of 97%. According to the 1995-2007 Classification of Diseases Survey, China’s infectious diseases accounted for 49% of the total number of illnesses, of which bacterial infections accounted for 18%-21% of all diseases, that is to say, more than 80% belong to the misuse of antibiotics, and every year 80,000 people die as a result. As many as 300,000 children under the age of 7 in China are deaf due to the irrational use of antibiotics, accounting for 30-40% of the total number of deaf children, compared with only 0.9% in some developed countries. Among hospitalized infected patients, the death rate for drug-resistant infections is 11.7 percent, compared with 5.4 percent for common infections. These figures make China one of the countries with the most serious problem of antibiotic abuse in the world. The irrational use of drugs and insufficient understanding of the consequences of drug resistance are the main reasons for the high rate of drug resistance. Although China has promulgated the Guidelines for the Clinical Application of Antibiotics and the Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of the Clinical Application of Antimicrobial Drugs in 2004 and 2009, respectively, the implementation of the above guidelines and regulations by medical institutions is still not in place. According to statistics, the annual increase in medical costs due to antibiotic abuse is 80 billion yuan, and the overuse of third-generation cephalosporins alone costs China as a whole more than 700 million yuan a year. In China, the most common phenomenon is that patients order food-like asking doctors to prescribe antibiotics. But in the United States, buy antibiotics can be more difficult than buying a gun – antibiotics belong to the more strictly controlled prescription drugs, doctors can only according to the patient’s specific condition and the type of bacterial infection, the corresponding antibiotic prescription. If you break the rules, you’ll receive a warning or even lose your license. And no hospital pharmacy or drugstore is allowed to sell antibiotics to the public without a licensed signature from a medical professional. Superbugs are still emerging, and European experts are worried about a return to the pre-antibiotic era in China. Today, there is a growing list of “superbugs” in China that are resistant to almost all antibiotics, and they have become important pathogens for hospital-acquired infections. Such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa can change the permeability of the cell membrane, preventing the entry of penicillin drugs; tuberculosis bacilli by changing the structure of proteins in the body to prevent antibiotics and its combination; what’s more, some gram-negative bacteria can take the initiative to attack, hydrolysis enzyme hydrolysis off the penicillin and cephalosporin drugs. This resistance can be acquired both horizontally by other bacteria and vertically passed on to future generations. Many such phenomena occur in the clinic: infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria cannot be controlled by antibiotics, and ultimately lead to the death of the patient. As for the current NDM-1 superbug, in fact, the first case was found in Hong Kong as early as 2009, when a 66-year-old Indian-origin man’s urine sample contained E. coli with NDM-1, but the patient had recovered. The transmission route of the bacteria has not yet been finalized, but the main sources of the bacteria, India and Pakistan, are both close to China, and based on the current rate of spread and the frequency of international travel, we cannot rule out the possibility of NDM-1 entering China. On the other hand, according to the current development of antibiotic abuse in China, new superbugs will appear one after another within 10-20 years, and all antibiotics will be ineffective against them. Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SIDC) warned that if the momentum of antibiotic abuse is not effectively curbed, the human race is likely to return to the pre-antibiotic era.