Médecine et maladies infectieuses
-
Post-surgical meningitis and/or ventriculitis caused by Gram-negative bacteria may be difficult to treat due to the emergence of multiresistant strains. Two patients with multiresistant Acinetobacter baumannii central nervous system infection, successfully treated with either intravenous and/or intraventricular colistin are presented. Unresolved issues such as dose and duration of intraventricular colistin are discussed.
-
Severe Candida infections are frequent in intensive care units and difficult to diagnose. Various antifungal agents can be used to treat Candida severe infections, but the choice of the most adapted treatment strategy is difficult. According to different guidelines, it must be based on the efficacy and tolerance of the drug, but also on patient risk stratification and local epidemiology. A practical diagnostic approach will help to determine which patients will benefit from prophylaxis and empiric therapy.
-
The medical treatment of many bone and joint infections (including chronic osteomyelitis, prosthetic joint infection, and septic arthritis) requires prolonged intravenous antimicrobial therapy. For some patients, this treatment could be administered outside the hospital in a program that offers outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT). In France, we have no registry of patients receiving OPAT. ⋯ Several published studies demonstrate the effectiveness of OPAT and higher patient satisfaction than hospital care. In addition, OPAT is clearly more cost-effective than intravenous therapy provided in the hospital setting. Some diagnoses, such as cellulites, community-acquired pneumonia, and endocarditis may be managed with OPAT.
-
The golden age of antibacterial antibiotics extend from year 1941 to the 1990s decade. At that time, something like an earth quake occurred: from the thirty molecules or so whose development was being achieved or was already marketed, only three were put on the French market, and faced the greatest difficulties to be prescribed by practicians, because: the knights of good practice want a strict limitation of their use to precise indications; the pharmaceutical companies find that the return on investment is almost impossible; the prescribers are stunned by the inconsistency between the MAs, the advances in science and the health economic authorities advices which claim that these products are not very interesting; the research for new antibiotics is stalling; thus, for the first time in 60 years, an iconoclastic question arises: do we need new antibiotics? However, while the debate is raging, many of us think "yes we do", as it is a duty to anticipate today the consequences of tomorrow's bacterial resistances. This paper presents three types of propositions to optimise the development of future molecules: sharpening of the data concerning preclinical security for a better predicting of both the activity and the toxicity; improvement in performances and organization of clinical trials, which implicates to reconsider some of the present methodological rules; inclusion in the evaluation data of some relevant and new features measuring the anti-bacterial activity while taking into account the present and future bacterial resistances. The development of new concepts to develop new drugs which would be active against tomorrow's bacteria compels us to manage in a new fashion today's systems, which have reached their own limits.