India May Foster Drug-Resistant Bubonic Plague

Drug-resistant bacteria are becoming more and more common, especially in India, where there is high anti-biotic use, and poor sanitation and hygiene.

Bloomberg reports that this rampant use of antibiotics is leading to India becoming a hotbed for drug-resistant super-bugs, organizms that are virtually unstoppable, and that have no cure, including the so-called last resort of high-powered antibiotics.

India is home to a $12.4 billion pharmaceutical industry, making the drugs widely available. Even in the United States, antibiotics are used so frequently that people are becoming resistant or immune to their effects.

Not only are the superbugs in India growing rapidly, they are also spreading around the world, because of tourism and global travel. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan stated during a March meeting in Copenhagen that:

“Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill. Hip replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy and care of preterm infants would become far more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake.”

Donald E. Low, head of Ontario’s public health lab in Toronto, says that:

“If this latest bug becomes entrenched in our hospitals, there is really nothing we can turn to. Its potential is to be probably greater than any other organism.”

The new drug-resistant bugs are multiplying rapidly, because of their connection to a gene called NDM-1 (short for New Delhi metallo-beta- lactamase-1), which was discovered in 2007 when a Swedish man was hospitalized in New Delhi with an infection that resisted all standard antibiotic treatments.

Not only are these superbugs drug resistant, they also multiply at a much higher rate, making it so that the NDM-1 gene can be carried across many different kinds of bacteria, including E. coli, soil-inhabiting microbes, and water-loving cholera bugs.

If normal viruses becoming drug-resistant is enough to make you nervous, imagine what could happen if the gene spreads to the microbial cause of the bubonic plague, the medieval disease known as the Black Plague, which still persists in small pockets around the world.

Mark Toleman, a molecular geneticist at Cardiff University, states that, “It’s a matter of time and chance.” In lab tests, plasmids carrying the drug-resistant gene can be inserted easily into yersinia pestis, the cause of the bubonic plague, making the infection much harder to treat.

Abdul Ghafur, an infectious diseases doctor in Chennai, India, believes that:

“There is a tsunami that’s going to happen in the next year or two when antibiotic resistance explodes…we need wartime measures to deal with this now.”

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