UTIs Are Horrible and Soon There Will Be No Drugs That Can Help You

A superbug circulating in the United States can turn an annoying infection into something much more serious.

<a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/i-need-a-sample-gm172931063-6174298?st=_p_urinesample%20doctor">Khuong Hoang</a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A superbug that can shake off a last-ditch antibiotic called colistin has been alarming the global health community since 2015. It first turned up in hogs on a Chinese farm and has since been found in 30 other countries, including the United States. According to a new paper by Rutgers and Columbia University researchers, colistin-resistant E. coli has been here since August 2014 at the latest—and the particular strain they found is also resistant to another family of last-resort antibiotics, carbapenems.

We’re “essentially building toward a situation where you’re going to have difficult if not impossible to treat urinary infections.”

To learn more about the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the research team took a fresh look at old samples of E. coli taken from patients at a New Jersey hospital. The worrisome strain appeared in a urine sample taken in 2014 from a 76-year-old man with a urinary tract infection. At the time, the case was fairly routine—the man’s UTI was cured by common antibiotics. But when the researchers re-analyzed the sample this year, they found the E. coli in it could withstand both colistin and carbapenems—the first bacteria identified in the United States with resistance to both drugs. 

Worse still, gene sequencing showed that the genes that gave the E. coli strain the ability to resist the two crucial drugs aren’t just any old genes. They exist on what’s known as a plasmid, a DNA fragment that readily jumps from one bacterium to another. The E. coli strain’s plasmids were “highly similar” to the ones found in that Chinese hog last year. These so-called “plasmid-mediated” genes that deliver colistin and carbapenems resistance can theoretically bounce over to other strains—including ones that have already developed resistance to other antibiotics. Indeed, the New Jersey strain proved to be resistant to “several” other classes of antibiotics in addition to colistin and carbapenems, the researchers found.

It’s also chilling that this superstrain of E. coli turned up in a UTI case. E. coli is the most common trigger of UTIs, which in turn are “among the most common infections in people,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These strains are probably already in the community and could spread further, essentially building toward a situation where you’re going to have difficult if not impossible to treat urinary infections,” Rutgers’ José Mediavilla, a lead author on the study, said in a press release. Thus a condition that used to be an easily cured annoyance could morph into a serious public health threat—lingering UTIs can trigger kidney damage and even sepsis.

The slow unraveling of antibiotics as a tool to fight infections is intimately related to modern meat production, which for decades has relied on antibiotics to make animals put on weight faster and fight off disease in tight, unsanitary conditions. While overuse in human medicine surely plays a role, nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States flow into livestock farms, the latest FDA figures show. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the UK government, and other public health authorities warn that overuse of drugs in meat farming are a key generator of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which cause 90,000 US deaths annually, while also racking up $55 billion in costs and causing 8 million additional days that people spend in the hospital, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

And as Maryn McKenna showed in a 2012 Atlantic piece, a growing body of research links human UTIs with resistant E. coli strains in US, Canadian, and European chicken. She writes:

The researchers contend that poultry—especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that Americans eat more than any other meat—is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it—say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated—are easy ways to become infected.

Since that time, the US poultry industry has begun to move away from reliance on antibiotics, a story I told here. But as I showed in my piece—and as that rogue colistin-resisting gene underlines—these reforms may be too little, too late. Resistant pathogens cross borders in all kinds of ways—in traveling people, in food exports, and in wild birds, for example. And as the US meat industry finally begins to wean itself from routine antibiotics, China is moving in the opposite direction, as the below chart from my article shows. Indeed, colistin itself has never been routinely used on US farms, but it’s quite common on China’s vast and growing hog and fish facilities.

 

 

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate