A flesh-eating form of pneumonia that is easily passed between healthy people on public transport is spreading across the UK, experts have warned.

The deadly strain of MRSA called USA300 passes easily through skin-to-skin contact. It can also survive on surfaces and so has the potential to be picked up on crowded buses and tubes. It was first seen in the U.S but cases are now being reported in the community and not just hospitals in Britain.

USA300 is resistant to treatment by several front-line antibiotics and can cause large boils on the skin. In severe cases, USA300 can lead to fatal blood poisoning or a form of pneumonia that can eat away at lung tissue. There were 1,000 cases of community acquired MRSA in England in the last year, of which 200 were USA300 strains.

Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in that is resistant to all antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.

The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease — called H041 — cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.

Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both “alarming” and “predictable.”

In a telephone interview Unemo said the fact that the strain had been found first in Japan also followed an alarming pattern — “Japan has historically been the place for the first emergence and subsequent global spread of different types of resistance in gonorrhea,” he said.

Unemo said however that experience from previous degrees of resistance acquired by gonorrhea suggested this new multi-drug resistant strain could spread around the world within decades. “Based on the historical data … resistance has emerged and spread internationally within 10 to 20 years,” he said.

Here comes the Brood. An enormous brood of cicadas that covers parts of 16 states is beginning to wake from its 13-year slumber underground.

The inch-long insects have been reported hatching in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Arkansas. They will appear farther north as soil temperatures reach 64 degrees.

“There are billions of them in the trees,” Greta Beekhuis says, speaking by phone from Pittsboro, N.C. The sound of the cicadas is clearly audible over the line. “When I drove from my house to the grocery store, I ran over thousands of them. They’re everywhere. The air is just thick with them.”

Scientists call these cicadas the Great Southern Brood or Brood XIX. It is the world’s largest “periodical” brood, one that surfaces after years.

Cicadas aren’t dangerous, and are non-toxic and even edible, says Kritsky, a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati. “The Iroquois ate them all the time.”

Man with bubonic plague.

I thought that the plague had been eradicated in the Old World of Europe centuries ago. Shows how much I know – it’s back, in New Mexico of all places. Phillip Caulfield reports for the Daily News:

A 58-year-old man in New Mexico was recently treated for bubonic plague, the first case of the disease formerly known as “Black Death” to surface in 2011.

Health officials in Santa Fe said the unidentified man spent a week in the hospital after suffering high fever, intense pain in his stomach and groin and swollen lymph nodes.

He was treated and released, but officials would not say when.

The results of blood tests released Thursday confirmed the man had bubonic plague, officials said.

Doctors said the man was most likely bitten by a flea carrying the plague bacteria, the most common method of transmission to humans.

Rat-borne fleas can carry the bacterium, and humans can also catch the disease from contact with infected rodents or animals.

“He was probably bitten by a flea somewhere on his left leg,” Department of Health veterinarian Paul Ettestad told the Santa Fe New Mexican…

[continues in the Daily News]

It all started in August 2007, on a family holiday in New England. Paul had been watching Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix with his wife and two sons, and he had started to itch. His legs, his arms, his torso – it was everywhere. It must be fleas in the seat, he decided.

But the 55-year-old IT executive from Birmingham has been itching ever since, and the mystery of what is wrong with him has only deepened. When Paul rubbed his fingertips over the pimples that dotted his skin, he felt spines. Weird, alien things, like splinters. Then, in 2008, his wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when the cotton swab she was using gathered a curious blue-black haze from his skin. Paul went out, bought a £40 microscope and examined the cotton. What were those curling, coloured fibres? He Googled the words: “Fibres. Itch. Sting. Skin.” And there was his answer. It must be: all the symptoms fitted. He had a new disease called morgellons. The fibres were the product of mysterious creatures that burrow and breed in the body. As he read on, he had no idea that morgellons would turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.

[Continues at The Guardian]

Researchers at IBM are designing nanoparticles that kill bacteria by poking holes in them. The scientists hope that the microbes are less likely to develop resistance to this type of drug, which means it could be used to combat the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance.

IBM’s labs aren’t equipped for biological tests, so the researchers collaborated with Yi Yan Yang at the Singapore Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology to test the nanoparticles. They found that the nanoparticles could burst open and kill gram-positive bacteria, a large class of microbes that includes drug-resistant staph. The nanoparticles also killed fungi.

The IBM researchers believe the drug could be injected intravenously to treat people with life-threatening infections. Or it could be made into a gel that could be applied to wounds to treat or prevent infection.

However, other drugs that work by this membrane-piercing mechanism have not been very successful so far. Those that have shown early promise on the lab bench either were toxic to animal cells or simply didn’t work in the complex environment of the human body.

More tests will be needed to say definitively whether the nanoparticles are safe and will work in people. Initial tests of the IBM particles with human blood cells and in live mice have been promising.

Welcome to a world where the drugs don’t work. For decades scientists have managed to develop new medicines to stay at least one step ahead of an ever-mutating enemy.

Now, though, we may be running out of road. MRSA alone is estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States — far more than HIV and AIDS — and a similar number in Europe. Other drug-resistant superbugs are spreading. Cases of often fatal “extensively drug resistant” tuberculosis have mushroomed over the past few years. A new wave of “super superbugs” with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.

NDM 1 is what’s growing on the plates that Livermore holds in his gloved hands. “You can’t win against evolution,” says the scientist, who spends his days tracking the emergence of superbugs in a national reference laboratory at Britain’s Health Protection Agency. “All you can seek to do is to stay a jump ahead.”

The fact that the latest superbug — NDM 1 stands for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, an enzyme that gives bacteria multidrug resistance — first emerged in India comes as little surprise to many microbiologists. Use of antibiotics is rampant and unregulated in a country with appalling sanitation, high rates of diarrheal disease and overcrowding — ideal conditions for resistance to develop. A week-long course of antibiotics can cost as little as 30 or 40 U.S. cents from one of the thousands of chemist shops that all too often dispense poor advice along with their non-prescription drugs.

Cases of bacteria producing NDM 1 have now been found and documented in two dozen countries from North America to Europe to New Zealand to China to Kenya.

Livermore’s work shows only two or three remaining antibiotics can kill these bugs — one is toxic, so doctors use it only in extreme cases; the second can’t be used to treat urinary tract infections, one of the most common infections caused by E.coli; and the third is not available in many countries and is anyway susceptible to easily developed resistance.

A virus has killed millions of crickets raised to feed pet reptiles and those kept in zoos. The cricket paralysis virus has disrupted supplies to pet shops across North America as a handful of operators have seen millions of their insects killed.

Some operations have gone bankrupt and others have closed indefinitely until they can rid their facilities of the virus.

Cricket farms started in the 1940s as a source of fish bait, but the bulk of sales now are to pet supply companies, reptile owners and zoos, although people also eat some. Most U.S. farms are in the South, but suppliers from Pennsylvania to California also raise crickets.

The virus had swept through European cricket farms in 2002. It was first noticed in 2009 in the U.S. and Canada.

Dead mice packed with drugs were recently airdropped into Guam’s dense jungle canopy—part of a new effort to kill an invasive species of snake on the U.S. Pacific island territory.

In the U.S. government-funded project, tablets of concentrated acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are placed in dead thumb-size mice, which are then used as bait for brown tree snakes.

Only about 80 milligrams of acetaminophen—equal to a child’s dose of Tylenol—are needed to kill an adult brown tree snake. Once ingested via a dead mouse, it typically takes about 60 hours for the drug to kill a snake.

Inadvertently introduced to Guam (map) from the Solomon Islands after World War II, brown tree snakes are responsible for the extinction or severe reduction of several of the island’s native species.

Before the laced mice are airdropped, they are attached to “flotation devices” that each consist of two pieces of cardboard joined by a 4-foot-long (1.2-meter-long) paper streamer.

The flotation device was designed to get the bait stuck in upper tree branches, where the brown tree snakes reside, instead of falling to the jungle floor, where the drug-laden mice might inadvertently get eaten by nontarget species, such as monitor lizards.

Ukrainian News Agency “Fraza” reported that, according to informed sources, “it has been confirmed 100 % Pneumonic Plague in Ukraine”.

The Agency asserts that “the head physician of the medical institutions has sent out an informal disposal – not to sow panic, to refute the information about the plague, and to speak only of swine influenza”.

It is also required to distribute masks at health facilities with 8 levels of protection and anti-plague protection costumes. There is also an informal order not to allow any visitors to see the patients.

According to the “Fraza” agency, “today in Ukraine pneumonic plague is going in parallel with swine flu. The plague has killed over 60 people, and about 14 from the flu.

Meanwhile, the press service of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine reported that there is only one death from “California” virus A/N1N1 in Ukraine.

“In Ukraine there are 22 cases recorded of the virus A/N1N1 disease and there is only one fatal consequence as a result. All other cases of death from influenza has only a speculative attitude to “California” virus,” press service reports.

The situation with the epidemic of influenza is a complex and unpredictable because of the propensity of influenza A/H1N1 virus to mutation, said First Deputy Minister of Health Mr. Lazoryshynets on Monday, November 2.

“The situation is complicated and unpredictable. We found a strain of this virus in our laboratory … This virus is dangerous because it can mutate, and we can get a very different kind of virus, which was in Latin America or in Mexico, now it is European “, – said Lazoryshynets at a press conference, the “Correspondent” magazine informs.

At a press conference Lazoryshynets also said that there are 22 officially confirmed cases of influenza A/H1N1 in Ukraine.

First Vice Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchinov previously stated that as of Monday morning, November 2, there are 64 registered deaths in Ukraine from flu and acute respiratory viral infections…