The article is scary… I used to study biology and still know a dozen antibiotics by heart. This was resistant to everything I remembered. Reading the passage, I was unable to guess what they treated it with. The article follows up by telling, however. :)
Testing indicated that the cholera strain that the travelers brought home was a particularly nasty one. V. cholerae O1, which is linked to other recent outbreaks in Eastern and Middle Africa, is resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics, namely: fluroquinolones, trimethoprim, chloramphenicol, aminoglycosides, beta-lactams, macrolides, and sulphonamides. The strain also carried a separate genetic element (a plasmid) that provided resistance mechanisms against streptomycin and spectinomycin, cephalosporins, macrolides, and sulphonamides.
spoiler
Fortunately, this strain was still susceptible to the antibiotic tetracycline, one of the drugs of choice for cholera. However, there are reports of other cholera strains in Africa that have also acquired tetracycline resistance.
The article is scary… I used to study biology and still know a dozen antibiotics by heart. This was resistant to everything I remembered. Reading the passage, I was unable to guess what they treated it with. The article follows up by telling, however. :)
spoiler