Antibiotic-resistant microorganisms remain susceptible to modern drugs, according to research presented at the American Society for Microbiology’s annual ICAAC meeting in Washington, DC, on 7 September 2014[1]
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Staphylococcus aureus samples showed almost no resistance to daptomycin, linezolid, or tigecycline, according to data from the US study, which also found no meticillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA) isolates that were resistant to ceftaroline, a new cephalosporin antibiotic. The data, presented in a poster, also suggest that the prevalence of MRSA declined from 53.4% of isolates in 2009, to 45.0% in 2013.
“There were some cases of resistance to ceftaroline in Greece, but there were none in the United States during the study period,” said Sandra Richter, section head of clinical microbiology at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, and co-author of the poster. “This is the first cephalosporin with activity against MRSA; when the sample has a Mec-A mutation, ceftaroline can still bind to it, so you get a nice inhibition of cell wall synthesis. The drug is a nice alternative to vancomycin.”
The efficacy of vancomycin also held up well. During the six-year study period, only two samples were found to have intermediate resistance to vancomycin, both of them in 2013, according to the poster.
