from The Boston Globe, March 5, 2017
They found it: Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterium that occurs naturally in soils and can live quite peaceably in human guts, mouth, or skin. If it makes its way elsewhere, it can cause disease — often pneumonia, but a number of other conditions as well. Until recently, the treatment for a K. pneumoniae infection was simple and effective: Give the patient one of a range of common antibiotics. Accordingly, her medical team tested the patient’s bacterial samples to see which drug would work.
The answer came back: none of them. Her microbes were resistant to all 14 antibiotics available in Reno. The hospital sent samples to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the tests there showed that these bugs were resistant to 12 more drugs. That was it. There was nothing else available in the United States that could touch this disease. (For more details on this unsettling case, see Helen Branswell’s coverage in The Boston Globe’s sister publication, STAT.)
In January, the CDC reported that the woman had died in early September, killed by a superbug for which there is no cure.