6 | NewScientist | 21 September 2013

IT’S official: America’s antibiotic army is on its last legs.

A report this week from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that bacteria resistant to antibiotics kill 23,000 Americans each year and infect 2 million. “If we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives,” warns Tom Frieden, director of the CDC.

The report’s findings have raised the pressure on the US Food and Drug Administration to ban farm owners from giving antibiotics to livestock simply to

fatten them up. This widespread practice – which accounts for 80 per cent of all antibiotic use in the US – increases the risk of resistant strains developing and spreading to hospitals. The FDA is currently implementing a strategy that it says promotes judicious use of

Superbug warning antibiotics on farms – but only on a voluntary basis.

Frieden, however, says that the most acute problem is in humans. “Most resistant organisms in hospitals are emerging because of bad antimicrobial stewardship,” he says. The report concludes that half the antibiotics doctors prescribe are not needed, but concedes that much of antibiotic use in animals is also unnecessary.

“To fully overcome this threat, we need to put a stop to all inappropriate antibiotic use, meaning we cannot ignore the rampant misuse of antibiotics in livestock,” says Mae Wu of the Natural Resources Defense Council lobby group in Washington DC. She says the FDA’s guidelines leave gaping holes that allow antibiotics to be used on healthy animals under the guise of disease prevention.

The CDC report coincides with another study that suggests as many as 11 per cent of superbug infections in Pennsylvania residents between 2005 and 2010 originated from pig manure spread on nearby fields (JAMA Internal Medicine, doi.org/nt7).

Oz dumps scienceAUSTRALIA no longer has a science minister, following the election of a new government just over a week ago. That could be bad news for climate change, and big science efforts such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.

The government clashed with scientists almost immediately, when it dramatically switched strategy on climate change, including by dumping the nation’s emissions trading scheme. Now the prime minister,

Tony Abbot, has cut the science minister post, saying education and industry can pick up the slack.

Scientists don’t agree. Les Field, policy secretary at the Australian Academy of Science, says a minister is needed so that there is a long-term vision. This is particularly important for issues like climate change but also for research projects such as the SKA, a huge internationally funded telescope array, part of which will be in Australia. “The lifetime of that venture is 30 years plus and we need a plan for managing it.”

–Looking for sarin in Damascus–

Quick and dirty Syria planIT WILL have to be fast – and it will be dangerous. The US and Russia have agreed in Geneva to an aggressive and difficult plan to find and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons (CW). UN inspectors, meanwhile, have confirmed that sarin-containing rockets of a type owned by Syria’s government were found at the site of the CW attack in Damascus in August.

The US and Russia will ask the UN Security Council for a resolution mandating the rapid destruction of Syria’s CW, under rules allowing a military response to non-compliance. Syria will then get only seven days to declare all its weapons. Then it must destroy its CW production facilities by November, and the CW – thought to include hundreds of tonnes of sarin and mustard gas – by next July

(see page 22). Verifying whether Syria has declared all its weapons will be tricky, particularly during a civil war. The chemicals should be destroyed outside Syria where possible, so the process can be more easily inspected, despite the hazards of transporting the material.

The UN inspectors analysed remnants of two rockets. Their trajectories suggest they came from government-held areas. One was a 330-millimetre artillery rocket with a large CW warhead. The other was a Russian M14 rocket with markings in the Cyrillic alphabet, a model Igor Sutyagin of the Royal United Services Institute in London says is used by the Syrian army – although it might have been captured by opposition forces. It also comes with a CW warhead.

“If we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty. We won’t have the antibiotics to save lives”

THE Costa Concordia has risen from the azure waters off Italy. But how does this affect the surrounding Pelagos marine mammal sanctuary?

The ship capsized in January 2012, killing 32 people. Last week the salvage effort entered a key stage when the wreck was hauled upright via a process called parbuckling. This was done gradually to protect the ecosystem. Bottlenose dolphins and endangered monk seals live near the crash site.

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Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara of Italy’s Tethys Research Institute says the ship likely contains toxic chemicals that could leak. But so far the righting operation has gone smoothly. He says the crash’s biggest impact will be on organisms that line the seabed, which was damaged when the ship ran aground, and by engineering works to rescue the wreck. New seabed vegetation will be planted in mid-2014 once the wreck has been removed.

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