Selection and characterization of a candidate therapeutic bacteriophage that lyses the Escherichia coli O104:H4 strain from the 2011 outbreak in Germany

In 2011, a novel strain of O104:H4 Escherichia coli caused a serious outbreak of foodborne hemolytic uremic syndrome and bloody diarrhea in Germany. Antibiotics were of questionable use and 54 deaths occurred. Candidate therapeutic bacteriophages that efficiently lyse the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak strain could be selected rather easily from a phage bank or isolated from the environment. It is argued that phage therapy should be more considered as a potential armament against the growing threat of (resistant) bacterial infection

Taking Bacteriophage Therapy Seriously:A Moral Argument

The excessive and improper use of antibiotics has led to an increasing incidence of bacterial resistance. In Europe the yearly number of infections caused by multidrug resistant bacteria is more than 400.000, each year resulting in 25.000 attributable deaths. Few new antibiotics are in the pipeline of the pharmaceutical industry. Early in the 20th century, bacteriophages were described as entities that can control bacterial populations. Although bacteriophage therapy was developed and practiced in Europe and the former Soviet republics, the use of bacteriophages in clinical setting was neglected in Western Europe since the introduction of traditional antibiotics. Given the worldwide antibiotic crisis there is now a growing interest in making bacteriophage therapy available for use in modern western medicine. Despite the growing interest, access to bacteriophage therapy remains highly problematic. In this paper, we argue that the current state of affairs is morally unacceptable and that all stakeholders (pharmaceutical industry, competent authorities, lawmakers, regulators, and politicians) have the moral duty and the shared responsibility towards making bacteriophage therapy urgently available for all patients in need

Phage Therapy:What Have We Learned?

In this article we explain how current events in the field of phage therapy may positively influence its future development. We discuss the shift in position of the authorities, academia, media, non-governmental organizations, regulatory agencies, patients, and doctors which could enable further advances in the research and application of the therapy. In addition, we discuss methods to obtain optimal phage preparations and suggest the potential of novel applications of phage therapy extending beyond its anti-bacterial action

Cross-Border Dissemination of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Euregio Meuse-Rhin Region

MRSA clones were associated with hospital-associated clonal complexes and with Panton-Valentine leukocidin–positive community-associated MRSA

The Ten Threats to Global Health in 2018 and 2019. A welcome and informative communication of WHO to everybody

The paper presents lists of Ten Threats to Global Health published by the World Health Organization in 2018 and 2019. The lists give health problems and emergencies which seriously menace the health and well-being of billions of people on earth. The threats and health challenges are commented in the text. The interested reader is referred to the concise and easily legible original documents which give core data about the threats, actions and responses

Uncertainty in integrative structural modeling

Integrative structural modelling uses multiple types of input information and proceeds in four stages: (i) gathering information, (ii) designing model representation and converting information into a scoring function, (iii) sampling good-scoring models, and (iv) analyzing models and information. In the first stage, uncertainty originates from data that are sparse, noisy, ambiguous, or derived from heterogeneous samples. In the second stage, uncertainty can originate from a representation that is too coarse for the available information or a scoring function that does not accurately capture the information. In the third stage, the major source of uncertainty is insufficient sampling. In the fourth stage, clustering, cross-validation, and other methods are used to estimate the precision and accuracy of the models and information

Different Clonal Complexes of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Are Disseminated in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine Region

The Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR) is formed by the border regions of Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands. Cross-border health care requires infection control measures, in particular since the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) differs among the three countries. To investigate the dissemination of MRSA in the EMR, 152 MRSA isolates were characterized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), SCCmec typing, and multilocus sequence typing. PFGE revealed major clonal groups A, G, L, and Q, suggesting dissemination of MRSA in the EMR. Group A harbored mainly SCCmec type III and sequence types (STs) 239 and 241. The majority of the strains from group G harbored SCCmec type I and ST8 and ST247, whereas most strains from group L carried either SCCmec type IV or type I. Within group L, ST8 and ST228 were found, belonging to clonal complexes 8 and 5, respectively. Most strains from group Q included SCCmec type II and were sequence typed as ST225. Both ST225-MRSA-II and ST241-MRSA-III were novel findings in Germany. In addition, the SCCmec type of two isolates has not been described previously. One strain was classified as SCCmec type III but harbored the pls gene and the dcs region. Another strain was characterized as SCCmec type IV but lacked the dcs region. In addition, one isolate harbored both SCCmec type V and Panton-Valentine leukocidin. Finally, the SCCmec type of the strains was found to be correlated with the antibiotic susceptibility pattern

Pairwise DNA homology of GEC-3S and phi1, GEC-3S and RB49, GEC-3S and JSE, compared using a sliding window of 50 bp.

<p>Pairwise DNA homology of GEC-3S and phi1, GEC-3S and RB49, GEC-3S and JSE, compared using a sliding window of 50 bp.</p

Transmission electron micrographs of myovirus GEC-3S.

<p>Phage particles were analyzed by transmission electron microscopy as described by Imberechts <i>et al</i>. <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0052709#pone.0052709-Imberechts1" target="_blank">[27]</a>. The head is somewhat elongated, appears hexagonal in outline and has a mean diameter of 102 nm (SEM = 3 nm). The head is separated from the tail by a neck. The tail is a rigid, contractile tube with a mean length of 109 nm (SEM = 1 nm). It appears cross-banded, suggesting helical symmetry. The tail ends in short and long fibers. The latter do not show up very well on this micrograph.</p