A once-forgotten antibiotic could be a new weapon against drug-resistant infections
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections has encouraged a search for new antibiotics. Deposit Photos Doctors may have a new tool to protect patients against multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. But the new defense against increasingly difficult-to-treat bacteria isn’t a brand new development—it is an 80 year-old antibiotic. A study published May 16 in the open access journal PLOS Biology looked at a natural product made in soil called nourseothricin that was discovered in 1942. [Related: Kids all over the US are getting strep, but antibiotics are hard to come by.] The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections has encouraged a search for new antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is a very serious and growing medical problem—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antimicrobial resistance killed at least 1.27 million people worldwide and was associated...