Correction to: Resistance to Antibacterial Agents: Foregone Conclusion - What's Next?

The article Resistance to Antibacterial Agents: Foregone Conclusion - What's Next?, written by Chand Wattal & Nancy Khardori, was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 11 December 2019 with open access.

Controversies in Treating Asymptomatic Bacteriuria and Urinary Tract Infection: A Case Based Review of Antibiotic Use in Renal Transplant Patients and its Impact on the Development of Resistance.

There is excessive use of both broad spectrum and niched antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs) in hospital and ambulatory setting in spite of clear guidelines on appropriate use. Majority of antibiotics prescribed in United States for UTIs are for nonspecific indications such as positive urine cultures in the absence of symptoms, etc. For these conditions especially asymptomatic bacteriuria, a large proportion of the antibiotics prescribed are unlikely to provide clinical benefit to patients.

Diagnostic Microbiology from the Beginning to the Future: Regional Antibiograms as Public Health Tools to Slow Down Antibiotic Resistance.

Infectious diseases is the only area of medicine where we can isolate the cause and study it in the laboratory under conditions similar to human body. Once isolated, we are able to determine the most optimal drug to treat it. Unfortunately, it is also the only specialty where after making truly wondrous strides we find ourselves at the crossroads of a public health crisis in the form of ongoing antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotics: From the Beginning to the Future: Part 2.

We read, write, and discuss the option of adding new agents to the armamentarium of antibiotic therapy very frequently. However, the past and present has taught us that resistance is likely to develop to any and all kinds of antibiotics. Here we start with an overview of potential future antibiotics from novel sources and targets that may circumvent most known resistance mechanisms.

Antibiotics: From the Beginning to the Future: Part 1.

The first written record of intervention against what later came to be known as an infectious disease was in the early seventeenth century by a Buddhist nun. She dried 3 to 4 wk old scabs from patients with mild smallpox and asked well people to inhale the powder. More than a century later in 1796, Edward Jenner described vaccination against smallpox by using cowpox that later was found to be caused by cowpox virus which is non-pathogenic for humans.