ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE
A my Cain gets a little paranoid whenever she prepares chicken for tea. She washes chopping boards and knives twice and makes sure there's no cross-contamination happening. “Food preparation is the one thing I get funny about,” she says.
Raw chicken can be contaminated with Campylobacter spp, Clostridium perfringens and Salmonella spp. The latter is the bug that causes typhoid, the infection Cain was fighting in 2007 while pondering what subject area she should take for her PhD. She chose food-borne infections. “I was like, I'm gonna get you,” she recalls.
Now an associate professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, Cain continues to peruse pesky bugs. Her current favourite is Acinetobacter baumannii, a superbug – a bacterium that survives currently available antibiotics. Declared one of the top three critical pathogens by the WHO, A. baumannii is so tough that it can live undisturbed on surfaces for months. Cain has isolated and desiccated it completely – rehydrated a year later, it was able to infect mice. It attaches to medical devices such as ventilator tubes and intravenous catheters and is responsible for up to 20% of infections in intensive care units.
Cain and thousands of other scientists around the globe want to understand more about the world of superbugs to find better ways to protect us from one of our biggest unsolved health threats. Superbugs are everywhere. They've been found in playgrounds, farms, drinking water, sausages and seagulls, riding tiny plastic fibres in the ocean, in Finnish paper mills, 300 metres underground in an isolated cave in New Mexico and even in the Arctic.
Our immune system can usually keep them at bay. But in hospitals, drug-resistant bacteria become a serious issue. This is where the six scariest pathogens – Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, A. baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter spp, collectively known as ESKAPE – are found. Hospitals are also where sick, debilitated, wounded and immunocompromised people are – and they're the perfect hosts.
“[Bacteria] are extremely opportunistic,” Cain says. “We have a rule in the lab: if you have a burn or
