New Threat: Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Causes Deadly Pneumonia

New Threat: Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Causes Deadly Pneumonia

July 18, 2009

NaturalNews - While the talking heads on TV have recently reported that thousands of people in the U.S. are now infected with the new "swine flu," or H1N1, there's another infectious disease problem brewing that has received little attention. The over-use and abuse of antibiotics has produced antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the National Institutes of Health, over the past forty years, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus has changed from a usually controllable nuisance into a serious public health problem. 


At first, it was primarily one of the most common hospital-acquired infections. But in recent years, new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, often dubbed "super bugs," have popped up in communities and caused severe, even life-threatening infections in otherwise healthy people, involving the skin, heart, blood or bones.

Now a paper just published in the June edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases discusses an emerging and potentially deadly threat from community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) -- necrotizing, i.e. "flesh eating," pneumonia. And according to previous research published in Nature News, this type of pneumonia is fatal in 75 percent of cases...