Triple Threat: New Pneumonia Is Drug-Resistant, Deadly And Contagious

[Cattledog]

In the past few years, there have been so many "superbugs" appearing in hospitals around the world that we here at Goats and Soda haven't had the time or resources to report on all of them.

But a new type of pneumonia emerging in China seems so important that we dropped what we were doing to write about it.

Doctors in Hangzhou in southeastern China have detected a a type of pneumonia that is both highly drug-resistant and very deadly. It also spreads easily.

The bacterium — a type of Klebsiella pneumoniae — killed five people in an intensive care unit in Hangzhou in 2016, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

"This fatal outbreak happened in a brand new hospital with very good hygiene," says microbiologist Sheng Chen, who co-led the study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. "Drug-resistant strains shouldn't have appeared so quickly."

The microbe can fight off all drugs available in China, Chen says. "We don't have anything in China to stop it," he says. "There is a drug available in the U.S. that should be effective against it, but we haven't tested it yet."


http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/09/02/547892623/triple-threat-new-pneumonia-is-drug-resistant-deadly-and-contagious?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170902

[tonyt53]

1. Wonder how it does against a person that has had the pneumonia vaccination?

[Nay]

2. I wonder. I got the pneumonia vaccination in the hopes that I could avoid any

pneumonia, but Klebsiella, I think, is a somewhat unusual bug to cause it. IIRC, the vaccine only protects against the 23 different variants of Strep pneumoniae, not Klebsiella, so the vaccine wouldn't protect us against that.

[Warpy]

5. The vaccine protects against all the really common types

and that will drop your number of lifetime cases greatly, which is really the point. It doesn't mean you are immune to exotic bugs, just resistant to common ones.

This one is rare, confined to a single hospital in China that we know of. I strongly suggest they call an exterminator. Hospital cockroaches were identified as a vector in a breakout of ordinary Klebsiella in a hospital in India in 1985.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Like influenza, pneumonia has a variety of strains.

You can be vaccinated against strains that the NIH has guessed would be probable for the coming season and still succumb to another variety.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. This needs to be on the greatest page, so more can see it.

rec