'New Delhi' superbug: US woman dies of infection resistant to all available antibiotics

New Delhi: A US woman, who was in her 70s, succumbed to an infection that she contracted while being treated for a fractured leg bones in India and was resistant to all available antibiotics, says a recent report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The woman, who died in Nevada in September, had been hospitalised in India with for a femur fracture and hip problems. After being treated for several times in India, she returned to the US last year, where she was was admitted to an acute care hospital in Nevada in August.

Tests on the woman confirmed the presence of New Delhi Metallo-Beta-Lactamase (NDM) – a rare superbug that makes resistant to antibiotics.

Doctors said that the woman was suffering from a carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) infection, which she had apparently contracted after being treated for a broken right hip in India.

The woman died of septic shock and tests on her wound specimen showed that the bacteria was resistant to 26 antibiotics.

Although it was unclear how the woman’s infection acquired resistance, postmortem tests showed her infection might have responded to a treatment called fosfomycin, which is not approved in the US.

Paul Hoskisson, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, said that several European countries, including Britain, license fosfomycin for intravenous use in such cases.

“This is important because we are seeing increasing numbers of drug-resistant infections, and this is one of the first cases for Klebsiella where no drug options were open to the medical staff.”

Multi-drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae has been described by the World Health Organization as “an urgent threat to human health.”

The report was published in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).