Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Cassandra Anderson didn’t think much of the phlegmy cough that rattled through her lungs. It was worse when she exercised, and in the morning, and helped her earn a new nickname, Coughing Cassie. But a scan in 2019 revealed some bad news. “My lungs were grossly deformed,” she recalls. “There were cavities and abnormalities. It looked like I was a pack-a-day smoker.
“It’s one of the toughest pathogens you can get”: Cassandra Anderson, right, with nurse Cara Jongmahasawat.Promiscuous and ingenious. That’s how Dr Norelle Sherry, an infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist at the Doherty Institute, describes superbugs. The term refers to bacteria, Microbes can develop resistance inside a person who’s taking antibiotics. But they can also be resistant before they infect someone, swirling around in the world with inbuilt protection against the drugs we’d usually throw at them.
A drug-resistant form of golden staph, or staphylococcus aureas, is the most dominant superbug in Australia. Nearly a third of people in the community carry golden staph in their nose or on their skin; 5 per cent of them host a drug-resistant type. It is harmless to most people and they have no idea they’re carrying it. But it can lead to serious infection and even death if it enters someone’s bloodstream through a cut, surgical wound or catheter.
The second-most common superbug has a multi-barrelled name: extended spectrum beta lactamase E. coli, an enzyme made by bacteria in the gut. It can cause serious infections in the bladder and urinary tract infections , and it’s something Sherry has firsthand experience of. When her daughter was three, she developed a urinary tract infection with ESBL. There was only one oral antibiotic that could treat her.
“I am already seeing antimicrobial resistance on a daily basis. What’s it going to be like in 20 years?”Yet today, widespread resistance to these antimicrobial medicines threatens the foundations of modern medicine, says Dr Akhil Bansal, a global health researcher on superbugs.
In Anderson’s case, a nurse visits her Sydney home every day to connect a bottle of third-line antibiotics to a catheter in her arm. She carries the cocktail of drugs in a bumbag and they are pumped into her bloodstream 24 hours a day. While the drugs keep some of her symptoms at bay and allow her to hold down a job as a medical receptionist, they will never eradicate the superbug living in her lungs. They have also caused hearing loss, tinnitus, lethargy and tiredness.