Biologists have found that almost half of the "Russian" strains of pneumonia pathogens are immune to the action of penicillin and its "cousins", and now they have begun to acquire resistance to the action of amoxicillin and other modern antibiotics. Their findings were published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.
“Antimicrobial resistance is a rapidly evolving public health threat. We need to continue to develop monitoring programs, involving the government, academic institutions, international organizations and pharmaceutical companies in their funding,”said Roman Kozlov, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Director of the Research Institute of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy of the SSMA in Smolensk.
In recent years, the problem of the emergence of the so-called "superbugs" - microbes that are resistant to the action of one or more antibiotics, has become more and more acute for physicians. Among them there are both rare infectious agents and very common and dangerous pathogens, such as Staphylococcus aureus (Staphilococcus aureus) or pneumococcus (Klebsiella pneumoniae). There is a real danger that all antibiotics will lose their effectiveness and medicine will return to the "dark ages".
The main "incubators" of such microbes, according to scientists today, are hospitals and livestock farms, where antibiotics are used to accelerate the growth of beef cattle. Both on farms and in hospitals, there are large numbers of potential carriers of the infection, both bacteria themselves and antibiotics, forcing them to evolve and preventing "ordinary" bacteria from driving out less prolific super microbes.
GSK, one of the largest manufacturers and developers of antibiotics in the world, has been monitoring such "superbugs" in the framework of the SOAR program since 2002. It also works in Russia, and is attended by leading epidemiologists and biologists from the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, as well as scientific centers in Smolensk and St. Petersburg.
The first results of these observations, which were conducted in our country from 2014 to 2016, paint a rather bleak picture - pneumococcus and Haemophilus influenzae, the two main causative agents of pneumonia, continue to rapidly build up their protective "arsenal" to fight antibiotics.
As these experiments have shown, approximately 36% of the microbes collected by them in Russian hospitals do not react to penicillin and its analogs, even in large doses. Other antibiotics are still effective against pneumococcus and Haemophilus influenzae, killing all their strains in the vast majority of cases.
On the other hand, scientists note that microbes have begun to develop immunity to their action. For example, 2-3% of strains of these bacteria resisted unusually well the action of amoxicillin, one of the most popular modern antibiotics, and cephalosporins did not work on 10-20% of pneumococcus and Haemophilus influenzae cultures.
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A similar situation, as doctors note, has not yet become critical, but it continues to develop in a very dangerous direction, since similar indicators in 2009-2013 were almost two times lower. The reason for this, according to pharmacists and scientists, is that Russians often buy these drugs, self-medicating, and doctors prescribe antibiotics for almost any reason, regardless of the type of infection and its resistance to antibiotics.