OutSMARTing Superbugs

摘要

When a 43-year-old woman (Patient 0) was transferred to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD, from a New York hospital in June of 2011, after developing complications from a lung transplant, there was a more-serious concern: She was colonized with Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC), a dangerous strain of bacteria. Klebsiella species commonly reside in the human gastrointestinal tract and pose little threat in cases of an infection, given currently available antibiotics, but this particular strain was immune to all of the common antibiotics-even those typically used as a last resort to treat the most-serious infections.