MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

Matthew 24:6-7, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places…”

By Caroline Porter, The Wall Street Journal – “The largest outbreak to date of one strain of what authorities have called ‘nightmare bacteria’ is adding to concerns about the spread of such drug-resistant bugs.

The outbreak, centered on a hospital in a Chicago suburb, has infected 44 people in Illinois over the past year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The bug, known as carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, bears a rare enzyme that breaks down antibiotics.

‘This is a huge cluster,’ said Alex Kallen, a medical officer with the CDC and supervisor for the Illinois outbreak investigation, noting that only 97 cases of the infection have been reported to the agency since 2009.

The superbug, which typically lives in the intestines and is part of a large family of bacteria, can be spread via fecal matter. It isn’t typically transmitted by casual contact outside hospitals.” Read more.

Flashback: India: New, Deadlier Form of Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Strikes Mumbai and Ratnagiri – “The TB menace in India is likely to grow worse with the new, deadlier form of virus detected in Mumbai. 12 tuberculosis patients at Hinduja Hospital in Mahim, Mumbai have been found to have a virus which has been termed Totally Drug Resistant (TDR) – TB. The viruses were isolated in the fluid samples of the patients. This virus has the latest and most severe form of drug resistance in TB viruses after the Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR-TB), and Extremely Drug-Resistant (EDR-TB) varieties diagnosed a while back.” Read more.

Flashback: ‘We Are Just Looking At The Beginning Of An Epidemic’: Drug-Resistant Staph Infections in Europe Could Mark Start of World’s Next Pandemic – “A relatively new type of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus could represent the world’s next bacterial epidemic, an environmental health expert said here today at a conference for science writers. The superbug, called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strain 398, or MRSA ST398, was first identified in an infant in the Netherlands in 1994 and traced back to her family’s pigs. Now, researchers are starting to see more serious infections and some of the cases reveal no direct link to livestock, said Lance B. Price, director of the Center for Microbiomics and Human Health at The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), in Flagstaff.” Read more.

Flashback: China Faces ‘Serious’ Epidemic Of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis – “China faces a ‘serious epidemic’ of drug-resistant tuberculosis according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of the size of the problem there, said a new US-published study. ‘In 2007, one third of the patients with new cases of tuberculosis and one half of the patients with previously treated tuberculosis had drug-resistant disease,’ said the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even more, the prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB in new cases (5.7 percent) was nearly twice the global average …” Read more.

Flashback: ‘Health Implications Are Significant’: Antibiotic Resistant Gonorrhea ‘Superbug’ Spreading, May Be Headed For America – “In the battle between man and bacteria, we seem to be losing ground. A new World Health Organization statement cautions that around the globe, gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. Approximately 106 million people are infected with gonorrhea each year (700,000 of these cases are estimated to occur in the U.S.), and fewer are responding to the treatments that once easily killed it. The organism has indeed become a ‘superbug,’ so what do we do now?” Read more.