A Nevada woman in her 70s has died from a superbug that was resistant to all available U.S. antibiotics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
The woman died from Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is present in the gut and commonly causes urinary tract infections, according to Stat News. She was treated with 14 different antibiotics, but 12 more were tested against the bacteria by the CDC after she died. None of them proved effective.
The woman had spent an extended period of time in India, where drug-resistant bacteria are more common. She fractured her leg while there, and the infection that resulted spread to her bone.
She was treated in isolation so that the bacteria would not spread to other patients, and doctors used special precautions to treat her to avoid infecting themselves, according to The Atlantic.
Doctors warn drug-resistant bacteria may be rare to the U.S. now, but are likely to get more common because of the widespread use of antibiotics to treat infections, which sometimes leads to overuse of the drugs.
“I think it’s concerning. We have relied for so long on just newer and newer antibiotics. But obviously the bugs can often [develop resistance] faster than we can make new ones,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen of the CDC, Stat News reported.
Using antibiotics on drug-resistant bacteria can make the infection worse because the antibiotics kill off all the other bacteria, leaving the immune system vulnerable and only the resistant superbug bacteria left in the system to grow and spread, The Atlantic reported.
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