Health Glance
This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the "mutation pressure" that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.
So if you're curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.
So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that's resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?
MILLIONS of women facing an elevated risk for breast cancer could slash their chances of getting the widely feared malignancy by taking a hormone-blocking pill used to treat the disease or prevent a recurrence, researchers say.
The bacterium that has killed more than a dozen Europeans, sickened nearly 2,000 more and raised international alarms would be legal if it were found on meat or poultry in the United States.
The Obama administration, expanding a program created by the new healthcare law, moved Tuesday to make health insurance more affordable and accessible for Americans who have been denied coverage because they are sick.
In the eyes of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), there is no difference between a legitimate, scientifically-backed health claim, and a phony, made-up claim, as it concerns food and dietary supplements. Only FDA-approved drugs, you see, provide real health benefits, according to the agency. And in its continued assault against health freedom, the FDA has sent warning letters to five different companies that produce natural treatments and cures for sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) because those companies dared to make unauthoried health claims, many of which are backed by peer-reviewed, journal-published scientific studies.
Once again, the World Health Assembly failed to set a deadline for the destruction of smallpox samples, delaying discussion for another three years. Though it still affirms the need for live sample destruction, the two-day “contentious debate” (repeated for the last 25 years) ended on May 24 in a victory for bioweapons development in the U.S. and Russia.
Ninety-three people in Sweden, most of them children, have been diagnosed with narcolepsy since taking the swine flu vaccine Pandemrix last winter, according to figures from the Swedish Medical Products Agency (Läkemedelsverket).
