---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 8:39 AM
Subject: re: From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic
To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
The argument that resistance won't develop against teixobactin isn't new. The same argument was offered (and fervently believed!) when vancomycin was introduced. Yet mere years after vancomycin entered clinical practice, resistant pathogens were encountered and resistance has spread across several genera now.
The argument that resistance won't develop against teixobactin isn't new. The same argument was offered (and fervently believed!) when vancomycin was introduced. Yet mere years after vancomycin entered clinical practice, resistant pathogens were encountered and resistance has spread across several genera now.
The world needs novel antibiotics, in no small part because we have abused the earlier ones. Teixobactin has huge promise. But if it were the antibiotic to end all antibiotics, the organism producing it would long since have taken over the world. Instead, it lives cheek by jowl with organisms that have long since learned to cope with it.
Barry Haskell Levine
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html
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