Enlarge / An ant carrying away one of the termites it preys on. (credit: Wikimedia Commons )

Although humans may think we are alone in creating antibiotics, there is a species of ant that secretes an especially powerful one—no pharma lab required.

The Matabele ants ( Megaponera analis) of sub-Saharan Africa eat only termites. Unfortunately, the fierce mandibles of termite soldiers cause injuries that, if infected, can turn fatal. Ants back at the nest rush to the injured and can tell which wounds are infected. They then secrete an antibiotic for them.

An international team of researchers observed these ants closely and analyzed their antibiotic secretion. They found it can reduce mortality by about 90 percent in injured ants and that the ants can identify chemical changes that result from infected wounds, focusing treatment on those that need it most.

Enlarge / Ukrainian medics of the battalion "Da Vinci Wolves" and "Ulf" paramedical unit transfer a wounded Ukrainian soldier to a stabilization point on the Bakhmut front as the Russia-Ukraine war continues on April 6, 2023. (credit: Getty | Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency )

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fueling a dangerous rise in bacterial drug resistance—an alarming reality made clear by a recent case report of an injured Ukrainian soldier who became infected with six different extensively drug-resistant bacteria, one of which was resistant to every antibiotic tested.

Health experts are sounding the alarm that the nearly unbeatable germs will likely spread beyond the war-torn country's borders. "Given the forced migration of the population, multidrug resistance of wound pathogens is now a problem not only for Ukraine but also for healthcare systems around the world, especially in the EU," Ukrainian scientists and doctors wrote in a recent letter in the Irish Journal of Medical Scientists.

The rise of antibiotic resistance is a long-standing, critical threat to global public health. In 2019, antimicrobial resistance was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide and linked to an estimated 4.95 million total, according to an analysis published last year in the Lancet .

Enlarge / Mycobacterium tuberculosis . (credit: Getty | NIH/NIAID )

A woman in Tacoma, Washington, with an infamous case of tuberculosis is now out of jail—with strings attached.

Law enforcement agents took the woman—identified only as "V.N." in court documents—into custody on June 1. At that point, V.N. had spent a year and half ignoring monthly court orders to have her tuberculosis case treated and/or isolate at home to keep from spreading her infection to others in the community. She also spent about three months on the lam , actively evading law enforcement as they tried to execute a March 2, 2023, civil arrest warrant. During that time, she was seen taking a city bus to a local casino and seemingly hid from law enforcement after that.

She was eventually apprehended at her home without incident on June 1, Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Darren Moss told Ars at the time. Deputies booked her into a negative pressure room in the Pierce County Jail, where she would get her court-ordered tuberculosis treatment without risk to others in the facility.

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Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME , a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug—SNIPR001—is currently in clinical trials .

The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream. The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15–20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli , and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections.

The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance.

Enlarge (credit: Jacqui VanLiew/Getty Images)

Ella Balasa was 26 when she realized the routine medical treatments that sustained her were no longer working. The slender lab assistant had lived since childhood with the side effects of cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that turns mucus in the lungs and other organs into a thick, sticky goo that gives pathogens a place to grow. To keep infections under control, she followed a regimen of swallowing and inhaling antibiotics—but by the beginning of 2019, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium lodged in her lungs was making her sicker than she had ever been.

Balasa’s lung function was down to 18 percent. She was feverish and too feeble to lift her arms over her head. Even weeks of intravenous colistin, a brutal last-resort antibiotic, made no dent. With nothing to lose, she asked a lab at Yale University whether she could volunteer to receive the organisms they were researching: viruses that attack bacteria, known as bacteriophages.

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Two more people have died and more details of horrifying eye infections are emerging in a nationwide outbreak linked to recalled eye drops from EzriCare and Delsam .

The death toll now stands at three, according to an outbreak update this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 68 people in 16 states have been infected with a rare, extensively drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain linked to the eye drops. In addition to the deaths, eight people have reported vision loss and four have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation).

In a case report published this week in JAMA Ophthalmology, eye doctors at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, part of the University of Miami Health System, reported details of one case linked to the outbreak—a case in a 72-year-old man who has an ongoing infection in his right eye with vision loss, despite weeks of treatment with multiple antibiotics. When the man first sought treatment he reported pain in his right eye, which only had the ability to detect motion at the point, while his left eye had 20/20 vision. Doctors noted that the white of his right eye was entirely red and white blood cells had visibly pooled on his cornea and in the front inner chamber of his eye.

Enlarge / Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB. (credit: Getty | NIH/NIAID )

A woman in Washington state is facing electronic home monitoring and possible jail time after spending the past year willfully violating multiple court orders to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated and to stay in isolation while doing so.

Last week, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department announced that it was " monitoring " a case of active tuberculosis in a county woman who had refused treatment.

"Most people we contact are happy to get the treatment they need," Nigel Turner, division director of Communicable Disease Control, said in a press announcement last week. "Occasionally people refuse treatment and isolation. When that happens, we take steps to help keep the community safe."