Antibiotics - the EU pipeline is empty too
We've talked before about the shrinking number of drugs available to treat MRSA and about the challenges of getting new drugs to market. Well, it's not just a problem in the United States.A new report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European M

New pig strain in China
Via Emerging Infectious Diseases comes the full version of a piece of research I posted on in September that was presented at the London conference Methicillin-resistant Staphylococci in Animals: Veterinary and Public Health Implications. A new MRSA variant — not ST398 — has been spotted in pigs in China.Luca Guardabassi and Arshnee Moodley of the University of Copenhagen and Margie O'Donoghue, Jeff Ho, and Maureen Boost of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University report that they found a

"Pig MRSA" in the EU - long-awaited survey
It's not very likely that people will be eating much pork today — OK, maybe some pancetta in the Brussels sprouts — and that's good, because there's lots of news today about MRSA in pigs.(In fact, there's a ton of news just this week. Make it stop.)The European Food Safety Authority has published a long-awaited, European Union-wide survey looking for the presence of MRSA in pigs. Here's the key points: Investigators found MRSA on 1 out of 4 farms where pigs were being raised and in 17 of the 24 EU states. (Two non-member states were included in the analysis.)Strictly speaking, this is not a survey of MRSA in pigs; the study s

CDC warns of deaths from H1N1 flu + bacterial infections
Over at CIDRAP, my colleague Lisa Schnirring writes tonight about the CDC's concern over increasing numbers of deaths from bacterial pneumonia in people who have come down with H1N1 flu.We've talked about this before here. Our concern of course has been MRSA, and there is good evidence that there have been fatal MRSA infections in flu victims. But the primary culprit now is not MRSA but pneumococcus (S. pneumoniae):

Two good reports published elsewhere
Some holiday reading:Mike the Mad Biologist, who often blogs about MRSA, has an analysis up about the varying degrees of attention that the Senate and House healthcare reform bills give antibiotic resistance and healthcare infectionsAnd Jacob Goldstein at the Wall Street Journal's WSJHealth blog describes an