Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Found in 37 U.S. States, as Congress wants to limit public research in science with HR3699(another form of SOPA).

Half a world away, doctors in India are fighting outbreaks of bacterial infections that are resistant to more than 15 types of antibiotics. But closer to home, a similarly scary bug is making the rounds in intensive care and other long-term units of American hospitals.

India Finds Cases Of Tuberculosis Completely Resistant To Drugs

This is scary.

A report  out of India identifies four new cases of tuberculosis that are completely resistant to drug treatment. They gave all four patients, ages ranging from 20 to 57, the full first-line and second-line batteries of drugs. The first-line included four to five drugs and the second-line five to six drugs for the patients. The drugs had no effect.

In at least 37 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, doctors have identified bacteria, including E. coli, that produce Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase, or KPC–an enzyme that makesbacteria resistant to most known treatments. It’s much more prevalent in America than bacteria that produce NDM-1, the enzyme that has Indian doctors ”hell scared,” and, according toAlexander Kallen, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the final outcome isn’t much different: superbacteria that are hard to kill.

That’s bad news for infected patients–the mortality rate for patients infected with KPC-producing bacteria has been estimated to be as high as 50 percent. Doctors are advised to do their best to keep the bacteria from spreading, which explains why the problem is most prevalent in hospitals and other close-quarter medical units. Infected patients are often isolated.

KPC has been seen in a wide range of bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella, and K. pneumonia, which often affects hospitalized patients.

These superbugs are resistant to nearly every weapon doctors can throw at them, including carbapenems, a class of antibiotic that the CDC calls the “last line of defense” against infections that are resistant to other types of antibiotics.

CDC researchers, including Kallen, say that hospitals who haven’t been vigilant about isolating patients with KPC-producing bacteria may have missed their chance. According to a paper co-authored by Kallen released last year, “failure to recognize CRE infections when they first occur in a facility has resulted in a missed opportunity to intervene before these organisms are transmitted more widely.”More    thank you battleskin88

No Science for You!

Congress wants to limit your access to research—even though your tax dollars paid for it. If this bill passes, you’ll learn only what mainstream medicine wishes you to know.Action Alert!

In 2008, the National Institutes of Health required that all federally funded research publications be made openly available. PubMedCentral (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.

The publishers of the journals weren’t so happy with this new arrangement—they were afraid no one would pay for their publications if the research results were immediately accessible. So the government agreed to give them a full year of journal sales before their research papers had to be posted on PMC, which lets them keep their subscriber base. Journal subscriptions to educational and medical institutions are expensive—and they’re big business.

But even this generous arrangement isn’t good enough for the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The trade group liked the old rules, where they could sell the tax-funded research back to the taxpayers. So the AAP got two members of Congress, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), to introduce HR 3699, the Research Works Act, just before the end of 2011.

This bill would prevent the NIH or any other agency from causing or even allowing private-sector research work to be disseminated online without prior consent of both the publisher and the study authors—even if the funding came from our tax dollars.

So what can you do? Two things will make a huge difference!

• First, help us gain co-sponsors for the Free Speech about Science Act (FSAS). This landmark legislation enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings about natural health products with the public. The problem, of course, is that if it becomes more difficult for supplement companies and consumers to access the scientific studies themselves, the entire point of FSAS is effectively undermined.
• The second step is to ask Congress to defeat this new Research Works Act. Please send your message today and explain why limiting access to the results of important studies—which your tax dollars have already paid for—is such a terrible idea. Take action immediately!