“It’s not that this bacteria is highly transmissible,” said Dr. Emil Lesho, director of WRAIR’s Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network and co-author of the report. “The concern is that this gene confers resistance to one of the drugs we use as last resort because it’s the last remaining thing available to kill a type of bacteria on the rise: carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE.” CREs are resistant to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, and often if you get a CRE infection, the only remaining option for treatment is colistin. That’s why this new finding is so alarming: If CRE bacteria comes into contact with mcr-1 bacteria, they could easily trade off resistance and form a superbug. But don’t freak out just yet. “We want to make sure people are concerned about the problem of antibiotic resistance in general, but we don’t want to create panic,” Lesho told me over the phone.

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