Mankind’s age-old battle against infectious diseases stands to rage on and on, unless scientists develop a new generation of triple-action antibiotics, according to an article scheduled for the March 28 issue of ACS’ monthly Journal of Natural Products.

Basilea Pharmaceutica AG, the Swiss biotechnology company working with Johnson & Johnson on anti-infective drugs, fell the most ever in Zurich trading after it failed to get U.S. approval for its ceftobiprole antibiotic.

A new study shows that antibiotics are useless in treatment for sinusitis, an inflammation of the paranasal sinuses, but rather breed drug-resistant bacteria.

MIT biologists have provoked soil-dwelling bacteria into producing a new type of antibiotic by pitting them against another strain of bacteria in a battle for survival.

Bacteria mutate for a living, evading antibiotic drugs while killing tens of thousands of people in the United States each year. But as concern about drug-resistant bacteria grows, one novel approach under way at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to thwart the bug without a drug by taking a cue from nature.

An article co-authored by Susan L. Mitchell, M.D., M.P.H., of Hebrew SeniorLife’s Institute for Aging Research reports that nursing home residents with advanced dementia are frequently prescribed antibiotic medications, especially during the two weeks before death.

Antibiotics appear to be frequently prescribed to individuals with advanced dementia in nursing homes, especially in the two weeks before death, according to a report in the February 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A team of scientists from the University Paris Descartes has solved the structure of two proteins that allow bacteria to gain resistance to multiple types of antibiotics, according to a report in EMBO reports this month.

When prescribed to children with middle ear infections, antibiotics are not associated with a significant reduction in fluid buildup in the ear, according to a meta-analysis of previously published studies in the February issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

When you check into a hospital, the odds are one in ten that you will become infected with a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria as a result of your stay. That is because the problem of drug-resistance has become endemic in today’s hospitals despite the best efforts of the medical profession. In the United States alone this currently causes about 100,000 deaths per year.

The number of prescriptions written out for antibiotics in Sweden last year increased for the third year in a row.

MIT and New York University researchers have identified a weakness in the defenses of the anthrax bacterium that could be exploited to produce new antibiotics.