Rejecting the advice of a doctor to go ahead...

Insignificant league pitcher in his youth, Richard Armbruster continued to play baseball and recreation in 70 years, until his right hip began to bother him. In February last year he went to St. Louis hospital for what should have been planned replacement hip joint. In late March, Mr. Armbruster, then 78, was dead. After a series of postoperative complications, the last shot was blood infection that sent him into shock and resistance to treatment. Never in the wildest dreams I think my dad went in for hip joint and be dead in two months, said Amy Fix, one of his daughters. Not until the day Mr. Armbruster died or laboratory culture to identify the organism that infected him: Acinetobacter baumannii. Rostock is one of the categories of bacteria, which by some estimates, has killed tens of thousands of hospital patients every year. While the body does not get as much attention as one known as

methicillin-resistant staphylococcus gold of some infectious disease specialists say they can turn into a big threat. This is because there are several drugs, including approved in the last few years that can treat MRSA. But the combination of business considerations and scientific problems, the industry

holds very little drugs for Acinetobacter and other organisms of the type known as gram-negative bacteria. However, microbes develop and become increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics. In many ways it is much worse than MRSA, said Dr. Louis B. Rice, infectious diseases specialist at Cleveland Louis Stokes VA Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University. There are strains out there, and they become more and more common, are resistant to antibiotics almost everything we have. Bacteria classified as gram-negative, so that their reaction to the so-called Gram test, can lead to serious >> << and urinary tract infections, blood and other body parts. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive bacteria, as MRSA. Acinetobacter, which killed Mr. Armbruster, came to him wide attention a few years ago infection soldiers wounded in Iraq. Meanwhile, in New York, perhaps because of the large number of patients to whom they belong, have become global stage for other drug-resistant Gram-negative germ, Klebsiella pneumonia. According to researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, over 20 percent of Klebsiella infections in hospitals in Brooklyn are now resistant to virtually all modern antibiotics. And they, supergerms now spread worldwide. Health authorities are not good indicators of how many infections and deaths in the United States caused by gram-negative bacteria.

Considers that approximately 1. 7000000 hospital-associated infections of all types of bacteria combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths per year. But in Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, Gram-negative infections is estimated to comprise two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths per year caused some of the most problematic nosocomial infections, according to the report published in September by health authorities. It should be noted that MRSA is the most common source of infection. This is especially feared because it can also infect people outside the hospital. There have been serious, even fatal, infections >> << and. In comparison, drug-resistant Gram-negative germs usually only threaten hospitalized patients whose immune system is weak. Microbes can survive for a long time on surfaces in hospitals, and enter the body through wounds, catheters and ventilators. The most alarming of gram-negative is not their frequency but their strattera without prescritpion drug resistance. For gram-positive, we need better drugs for gram-negative we need any medication, said Dr. Brad Spellberg, infectious disease specialist Harbor

Medical Center in Torrance, California, and author, The book is about drug-resistant pathogens. Dr. Spellberg is a consultant to some antibiotics companies and co-founder of two companies operating in other antimicrobial approaches. Condoleezza Rice Cleveland was also a consultant of some pharmaceutical companies. Physicians treating resistant strains of Gram-negative bacteria are often forced to rely on two similar antibiotics developed in the 1940s and polymyxin B. kolistyn These drugs were largely abandoned decades ago because they can lead to kidney and nerve damage, but because they were not used much, bacteria were not likely to develop resistance to them yet. You really had no choice, said Dr. Azza Elemam, infectious disease specialist in Louisville, Kentucky If a person has a life-threatening infection, you should take the risk of injury in the kidney. Such a compromise before Kimberly Dozier, Correspondent CBS News, who developed Acinetobacter infection after injury in a car bomb explosion in 2006, while on mission in Iraq. After two weeks on kolistyn, Ms. Doziers kidneys began to sit, she said in her book. Rejecting the advice of a doctor to go ahead and look for Ms. Dozier stopped taking antibiotics to save her kidneys. Eventually she recovered from the infection. Even this terrible trade-off may not be available for some patients. Last year, doctors in St-Vincents Hospital in Manhattan published an article describing two cases of pan-resistant Klebsiella, incurable kidney, even harmful to older antibiotics. One patient died and one recovered on its own initiative, after antibiotics were stopped. It is rare for doctors in the developed world, the patient died of overwhelming infection, there is no therapeutic opportunities

in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. In some cases, resistance to antibiotics extends to Gram-negative bacteria that can infect people outside the hospital. Sabiha Khan, 66, went to the emergency hospital in Chicago New Year's Day suffering from urinary tract and

caused by Escherichia coli resistant to conventional antibiotics. Instead sent home to take pills, Ms. Khan had to stay in the hospital 11 days to get a powerful intravenous antibiotics. This month, the infection returned, sending her back to hospital for an additional two weeks. Some groups of patients say hospital propaganda should take better measures to prevent such infections as ensure that health workers wash their hands frequently and disinfect surfaces and instruments. And antibiotics should not be abused, they say, because it contributes to the development of resistance. To encourage prevention, Atlanta couple, Armando and Victoria Nahum

started after 27-year-old son, Joshua, died of nosocomial infection in October 2006. Jesus, skydiving instructor in Colorado, a broken skull and femur hard landing. During treatment, he twice acquired MRSA, and was infected with Enterobacter Aeho ^ epez, gram-negative bacteria. MRSA they got rid of with antibiotics, said Mr. Nahum. But, they just could not do anything with it. .