Lecture 33- Antimicrobial Resistance- Part 2

After today's lecture, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Questions 1-3 are from today's Powerpoint slides..
1. What is NARMS? Which three governmental Public Health agencies are involved with NARMS? How many NARMS sites are there? How many such sites are in New York?

2. Describe at least one pro and one con of antibiotic use in livestock.

3. Unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions increase the likelihood of antibiotic resistance. Why? About how many unnecessary prescriptions for antibiotics are filled each year in the U.S.? What did the Finnish study show concerning erythromycin resistance?

Questions 4-11 are from the chalkboard lecture or the article entitled, "The Bacteria Fight Back." This article was posted on the professor's drive in the folder named: april_24_2009_antimicrobial_resistance_continued.

4. According to the data from the CDC, how many deaths occurred in the US in 2002 as a result of bacterial infections? Of those deaths, how many were caused by drug-resistant strains of bacteria?

5. Why is the hospital environment particularly conducive to the acquisition and spread of drug-resistant bugs?

6. Who is Alexandar Tomasz and what did he have to say about penicillin? (What is penicillinase? What is a plasmid epidemic?)

7. What is MRSA? Why is MRSA a threat to public health? What is the name of the gene which confers the resistance to methicillin? According to data from 2002, what is the estimated number of hospital-acquired MRSA infections per year?

8. What is vancomycin? When was it discovered? What is VRSA?

9. When was linezolid approved by the FDA? When were linezolid-resistant bacteria first observed?

10. Describe the trend in new antibiotics approved by the FDA over the past 10-15 years. What might such a 'paltry pipeline' mean to the public health?

11. Is there an effective vaccine to prevent infection by S. aureus? What limits the usefulness of this vaccine?