Excellent End-of-the-Year News: Drugs Found to Slow MRSA's Resistance to Treatment

It used to be that Staphylococcus aureus could easily be treated with penicillin. Then it developed a resistance to that, and then to methicillin and other antibiotics. Eventually, it became the often-feared methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

Recently, MRSA has been moving out of the hospital setting and into the community, raising new concerns about antibiotic resistance.

But there's good news: A new study conducted by pharmacy researchers at Oregon State University has identified two antibiotics that appear to be less likely to cause future antibiotic resistance: linezolid and moxifloxacin. On the flip side, doxycycline and clindamycin are likely to cause rapid development of resistance against community-associated MRSA.

Researchers were especially intrigued by the discovery that moxifloxacin might be effective against the new strain of community-associated MRSA. Moxifloxacin, and other antibiotics in its class, had not previously been thought of as an appropriate agent against MRSA because resistance to it often develops rapidly.

The researchers' analysis was published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.