macrolides

But by the time the UCSF team started studying USA300, community MRSA had become resistant not only to the beta-lactam family of antibiotics, but to some additional drugs as well, chiefly a drug family called macrolides that includes the common antibiotic erythromycin.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

But by the time the UCSF team started studying USA300, community MRSA had become resistant not only to the beta-lactam family of antibiotics, but to some additional drugs as well, chiefly a drug family called macrolides that includes the common antibiotic erythromycin.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

But by the time the UCSF team started studying USA300, community MRSA had become resistant not only to the beta-lactam family of antibiotics, but to some additional drugs as well, chiefly a drug family called macrolides that includes the common antibiotic erythromycin.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

The first hurdle was getting the appropriate drugs for the infection, which had a community-MRSA resistance profile—insensitive to penicillins, cephalosporins, and macrolides, vulnerable to everything else.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

By the 1990s, those strains were resistant not only to the beta-lactams, but to at least some drugs in these families as well: macrolides (erythromycin); lincosamides (clindamycin); aminoglycosides (gentamicin); fluoroquinolones (ciprofloxacin); and tetracyclines.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

The first hurdle was getting the appropriate drugs for the infection, which had a community-MRSA resistance profile—insensitive to penicillins, cephalosporins, and macrolides, vulnerable to everything else.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

Losing erythromycin and the other macrolides had been problematic.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

They either destroyed a bacterium by ruining the integrity of its cell wall—that was how the original penicillins, the beta-lactams, vancomycin, and the cephalosporins worked—or they penetrated inside a bacterium, disrupting synthesis of DNA or RNA or proteins, which was the mechanism of macrolides, tetracyclines, fluoroquinolones, and rifampin.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

They either destroyed a bacterium by ruining the integrity of its cell wall—that was how the original penicillins, the beta-lactams, vancomycin, and the cephalosporins worked—or they penetrated inside a bacterium, disrupting synthesis of DNA or RNA or proteins, which was the mechanism of macrolides, tetracyclines, fluoroquinolones, and rifampin.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010

They were warned to be cautious about the use of fluoroquinolones and macrolides, because resistance to them was growing.

SUPERBUG MARYN MCKENNA 2010