title: Who's Winning the War? Molecular Mechanisms of Antibiotic Resistance in Helicobacter pylori.
abstract: The ability of clinicians to wage an effective war against many bacterial infections is increasingly being hampered by skyrocketing rates of antibiotic resistance. Indeed, antibiotic resistance is a significant problem for treatment of diseases caused by virtually all known infectious bacteria. The gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori is no exception to this rule. With more than 50% of the world's population infected, H. pylori exacts a tremendous medical burden and represents an interesting paradigm for cancer development; it is the only bacterium that is currently recognized as a carcinogen. It is now firmly established that H. pylori infection is associated with diseases such as gastritis, peptic and duodenal ulceration and two forms of gastric cancer, gastric adenocarcinoma and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma. With such a large percentage of the population infected, increasing rates of antibiotic resistance are particularly vexing for a treatment regime that is already fairly complicated; treatment consists of two antibiotics and a proton pump inhibitor. To date, resistance has been found to all primary and secondary lines of antibiotic treatment as well as to drugs used for rescue therapy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, 4301 Jones Bridge Rd., Bethesda, MD 20814, USA.
authors.forename: Kathleen R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Jeong-Heon
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Cha
authors.forename: D Scott
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Merrell