Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
How The Superbug Discovery Unfolded
Microbiologist Patrick McGann knew he had identified a dangerous germ. He just didn’t know how dangerous. In mid-May, a colleague had found a strain of E. coli bacteria from a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman that tested positive for resistance to a drug called colistin. That’s the antibiotic used when all others fail. McGann, whose job is to prevent outbreaks of new pathogens in the U.S. military’s sprawling health-care system, wasn’t yet alarmed. Sometimes mutations occur spontaneously that make bacteria resistant to an antibiotic. It would be a completely different problem, though, if the bacteria turned out to carry a certain colistin-resistant gene called mcr-1. (Sun, 6/6)
