Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Breast Implant superbugs from South Asia?

Thinking about shaping up that part of you that has always felt to you like its a little under the weather? Want bigger breasts, ladies? Or a fully posterior? A more perfect nose? How would you feel about those new breasts dropping off, or that nose, or that new butt, or simply dropping dead all together?

Researchers have found a new superbug living in these areas specially enhanced by plastic surgeries performed in South Asia. Plastic surgery patients have carried a new class of superbugs resistant to almost all antibiotics from South Asia to Britain and they could spread worldwide, researchers reported Wednesday.

"Many hospital infections that were already difficult to treat have become even more impervious to drugs thanks to a recently discovered gene that can jump across different species of bacteria.

This so-called NDM-1 gene was first identified last year by Cardiff University's Timothy Walsh in two types of bacteria -- Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli -- in a Swedish patient admitted to hospital in India. Worryingly, the new NDM-1 bacteria are resistant even to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics often reserved as a last resort for emergency treatment for multi-drug resistant bugs."

"Checking hospital patients with suspect symptoms, they found 44 cases -- 1.5 percent of those screened -- in Chennai, and 26 (eight percent) in Haryana, both in India. They likewise found the superbug in Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well 37 cases in Britain, where several patients had recently traveled to India or Pakistan for cosmetic surgery."

"India also provides cosmetic surgery for other Europeans and Americans, and it is likely that NDM-1 will spread worldwide," said the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

So, it looks like if you're going to get that surgery, pay up, rather than getting the cheaper version from Asia, just get it from home. Unless you live in India of course.

AFP article on Yahoo News

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