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 / An MRI image of a brain with an abscess causing seizures. (credit: Getty | BSIP )

As pandemic restrictions eased, pediatricians around the country saw alarming upticks of rare brain abscesses in children under 18 years old, with national cases steeply climbing to a peak in December 2022. That's according to two studies led by researchers and health officials, which were published together Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Even at the height of the unusual surge, the brain infections remained rare overall, and the latest data suggests cases are on the decline. But, the infections are serious and potentially life-threatening. They occur when bacteria, viruses, or fungi enter the brain and an encapsulated area forms around the germs and pus. Bacteria, particularly Streptococcus , appeared to be the main culprit in the recent rise.

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Another person has died in an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant bacteria linked to contaminated eye drops, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in an update on Thursday .

The outbreak now totals 81 cases across 18 states. In addition to the four deaths, health officials have tallied reports of 14 people with vision loss and an additional four people who have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation) due to infection.

The bacteria behind the outbreak is a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa dubbed VIM-GES-CRPA. This unwieldy acronym stands for a carbapenem-resistant P. aeruginosa (CRPA) with Verona integron-mediated metallo-β-lactamase (VIM) and Guiana extended-spectrum-β-lactamase (GES). It is an extensively drug-resistant strain of bacteria that, until this outbreak, had never been seen in the US before.

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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 / Empty traditional jars (onggi, 옹기), used for storing kimchi, gochujang, doenjang, soy sauce, and other pickled banchan (side dishes). (credit: OlkhichaAppa/CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The fermented spicy cabbage known as kimchi is a staple of Korean cuisine, traditionally made in earthenware vessels known as onggi . These days most Korean households have kimchi refrigerators for that purpose, while on a commercial scale, kimchi is made via mass fermentation in glass, steel, or plastic containers. But is the kimchi made with these modern contraptions of equal quality to the traditional fermentation method? Many kimchi aficionados would argue that it is not, and now the pro-onggi faction has some science to back up that assertion.

It turns out that the porosity of the onggi's walls help the most desired bacteria proliferate during the fermentation process, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. “We wanted to find the ‘secret sauce’ for how onggi make kimchi taste so good,” said co-author David Hu of Georgia Tech. “So we measured how the gases evolved while kimchi fermented inside the onggi—something no one had done before.”

The handmade clay vessels known as onggi have long been used by Korean chefs to ferment foods, including ganjang (soy sauce), gochujang (red pepper paste), and doenjang (soy bean paste), as well as kimchi. The cabbage or daikon is sliced into small uniform pieces, which are coated with salt as a preservative. The salt draws out the water and inhibits the growth of many undesirable microorganisms. Then the excess water is dried and seasonings are added, often including sugar, which further serves to bind any remaining free water. Finally the brined cabbage is placed into an airtight canning jar, where it remains for the next 24 to 48 hours at room temperature. The jar is "burped" occasionally to release carbon dioxide formed during the fermentation process.

Enlarge / This highly magnified scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image depicts a number of spirochete bacteria, atop a culture of cotton-tail rabbit epithelium cells. (credit: CDC/David Cox )

A California man is the first person in the Western US to have a confirmed infection with a curious bacterium that has lurked in the region for over two decades—and researchers fear the pathogen may finally be emerging there.

The bacterium is Borrelia miyamotoi , a corkscrew-shaped spirochete that is spread by black-legged ticks and causes a rare disease called Hard Tick Relapsing Fever . The spiraled microbe is a relative of the more well-known Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete , the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. But B. miyamotoi has many notable differences from its cousin, including its inconspicuous spread.

While Lyme disease was first reported in 1975 in the US and B. burgdorferi first identified in 1982 , B. miyamotoi was only first identified in ticks in 1995 in Japan. But once discovered, it was soon found in many other places, including in Europe and many parts of North America. Ticks collected in California as early as 2000 were found to carry the new spirochete, for example. Yet, the first cases of disease caused by B. miyamotoi in the US were only first confirmed in 2013 in the Northeast. Until now, no confirmed cases have been reported in the western part of the country, despite the bacterium's prevalence in adult black-legged ticks ( Ixodes pacificus ) being similar to that of B. burgdorferi , the Lyme disease spirochete.

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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.

Enlarge / Pager, a 9-year-old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink. (credit: YouTube/NeuraLink )

The Department of Transportation is investigating allegations that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, violated federal transportation regulations when it shipped contaminated implants removed from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens. The alleged violations could have put humans at risk of exposure to hazardous germs, including drug-resistant bacteria and a potentially life-threatening herpes virus.

Reuters was the first to report the department's investigation , which was sparked by allegations brought Thursday by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a medical group that advocates for animal welfare in medical research. The Department of Transportation confirmed to Ars on Friday that it has opened a standard investigation of Neuralink in response to PCRM's allegations.

In a letter addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and William Schoonover, associate administrator of the department's Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, the PCRM laid out its evidence for possible violations of hazardous material transportation regulations based on a trove of documents and emails obtained through public record requests. The advocacy group says the evidence shows Neuralink's contaminated hardware was not properly packaged to prevent exposure to humans and that Neuralink employees who transported the material had failed to undergo legally required training on how to safely transport such material.

Enlarge / The Abbott manufacturing facility in Sturgis, Michigan, on May 13, 2022. (credit: Getty | Jeff Kowalsky )

The Department of Justice's consumer-protection branch has opened a criminal investigation into the conduct of Abbott Laboratories, one of the country's largest formula makers, at the center of a contamination scandal and ongoing nationwide shortage .

The existence of the investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Though the DOJ is not commenting on it, a spokesperson for Abbott said the department has informed them of the investigation and that the company is "cooperating fully."

Federal regulators last year found numerous violations and "egregiously unsanitary" conditions at Abbott's Sturgis, Michigan, plant, the largest formula factory in the country. The regulators previously received reports that at least four babies who drank formula made at that facility fell ill with dangerous infections of the bacterium Cronobacter sakazakii, which had also been detected in the plant. Two of the infants died.