More Than A Little Frightening.

Outbreak of antibiotic-resistant disease at Auckland City Hospital ... infection control procedures are underway to contain the spread of vancomycin-resistant enterococci ... But the number of new classes of antibiotics nearing the market to combat these pathogens is exactly zero. That's in keeping with the trend line of the past 20 years: Food & Drug Administration approvals of new antibacterials have fallen from 16 launched in 1983-87 to just 2 in the past five years.

The problem, say drug companies, is that antibiotics aren't very profitable. It can take up to 10 years and some $800 million to create a new drug, but it's tough to recover those costs, given that a course of antibiotics is usually prescribed just once, for 7 to 10 days. Then there's the antibiotic Catch-22: Doctors tend to limit prescriptions of new drugs for all but the most dire infections in order to delay the emergence of resistant strains. "What's good for the public health is a real disincentive for antibiotic development," says Dr. Barry I. Eisenstein, head of scientific affairs at Cubist Pharmaceuticals.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) just reported that a dangerous drug-resistant staph infection, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), has rapidly spread from hospital patients to the larger community. The CDC estimates that 94,360 people in the U.S. contracted MRSA in 2005, and 18,650 of them died.

Not surprisingly the resources go where the money is ... it is more than a little surprising though that Government funding has not compensated for this void in research into new antibiotics ... possibly not enough deaths yet?

It is also understandable that this research is not easy, as It doesn't help that rapidly mutating pathogens present a constantly moving target. Our very own glock-aided police would attest to this.