Pandrug-resistant bacteria from the war in Ukraine are extremely pathogenic
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By Tove Smeds - published 25 November 2024

It has been a year ago since bacteria from war-wounded at hospitals in Ukraine were analysed. The study, which attracted a lot of attention, showed that some of the bacteria types had total resistance to antibiotics. Now, the same researchers have examined the infectiousness of the bacteria. "The bacterium 'Klebsiella pneumoniae', which is resistant to all antibiotics, is also particularly aggressive and dangerous,” says Kristian Riesbeck, who led the study.

Lund University in Sweden has previously reported on Kristian Riesbeck, professor of clinical bacteriology at Lund University and senior consultant, who was contacted by the Ukrainian microbiologist Oleksandr Nazarchuk for assistance in examining the degree of antibiotic resistance in bacteria from severely war-wounded and infected patients being treated in hospital.

Using samples from 141 war-wounded (133 adults wounded in the war and eight new-born babies with pneumonia) it could be shown that several bacteria types were resistant to broad-spectrum antibiotics and that six per cent of all samples were resistant to all the antibiotics that the researchers tested on them.

Now, the researchers have published an article in Journal of Infection, in which the researchers have gone on to examine whether Klebsiella pneumoniae has the ability to cause disease in a wider context. Klebsiella can cause urinary tract infections, pneumonia, skin infections in wounds, and sepsis. The researchers used samples from 37 of the patients who had been previously shown to have resistant bacteria. The entire genome of the bacteria was sequenced to examine whether there were genes that can cause resistance.

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