The Staphylococcus aureus bacterium is one of the commonest pathogens and can even cause sepsis. The new antibiotic dalbavancin is very effective against many bacterial pathogens. However, resistance to the antibiotic was seen to develop during the long-term treatment of a patient with an infection caused by an implanted cardiac device. A team of researchers led by infectiologists from the Division of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine within the Department of Medicine I at MedUni Vienna, Manuel Kussmann and Heimo Lagler, have now described the phenotypical and genotypical mechanism of this development of resistance for the first time. The study was published in leading journal “Emerging Microbes & Infections”.

Staphylococci are bacteria and are part of the normal flora on the skin of humans and animals. Approximately 20% of the Austrian population permanently carry the germ, which is often located in the nasal cavity. There are harmless variants, which only cause mild symptoms, if any at all. In serious cases, the pathogen can find its way into the bloodstream and cause endocarditis and sepsis.

A problematic strain is Staphylococcus aureus, which can be acquired outside hospital but also in hospital as a so-called “hospital-acquired infection”. There are multi-resistant forms of it, which do not necessarily cause serious illness in healthy people. However, in weakened hospital patients or where the natural skin barrier is damaged, infection can result in complications. Nowadays dalbavancin, a latest generation antibiotic, is one of the drugs successfully used to treat multi-resistant bacteria. One of the advantages of this drug is its very long half-life of approximately nine days, so that intravenous treatment can be given on an outpatient basis. However, clinical experience has shown that, sooner or later, resistance develops to any therapeutic use of new antibiotics, so it was just a matter of time with this one.

Absorbent polymer sops up chemotherapy drugs from bloodstream after treatment.

Spotless surfaces in hospitals can hide bacteria that rarely cause problems for healthy people but pose a serious threat to people with weakened immune systems. Acinetobacter baumannii causes life-threatening lung and bloodstream infections in hospitalized people. Such infections are among the most difficult to treat because these bacteria have evolved to withstand most antibiotics.

And it could have a relatively short path to market.

Mosquitoes are some of the deadliest creatures on Earth. Now, scientists have taken a major step toward developing a “mosquito birth control” drug that can help prevent diseases responsible for several million human deaths annually around the world.

Researchers at the University of Arizona (UA) discovered a protein in mosquitoes that is critical to the insects’ process of producing viable eggs. When researchers selectively blocked the activity of the protein in female mosquitoes, the mosquitoes laid eggs with defective egg shells, leading to the death of the embryos inside.

In a report published in the open access journal PLoS Biology on Tuesday, the researchers said the protein — which they named Eggshell Organizing Factor 1, or EOF-1 — exists only in mosquitoes, so any drug developed to control mosquito populations would not affect other organisms, such as beneficial honey bees.

The leading academics Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have defended a hoaxer who sought to expose politically correct “nonsense” in social sciences.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy, faces losing his job at Portland State University in Oregon after he helped create spoof academic papers. These lampooned scholarship in various fields, including the studies of gender, homosexuality and obesity.

He and two collaborators dashed off 20 papers, each deliberately ridiculous and spiked with what the authors later described as “a little bit of lunacy”. Seven were accepted by peer-reviewed journals. One, titled “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity feminism as an intersectional reply to neoliberal and choice feminism”, was a rewrite of chapter 12 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with feminist “buzzwords switched in”.