Abstract
A bioterror event using an infectious bacterium may lead to catastrophic outcomes involving morbidity and mortality as well as social and psychological stress. Moreover, a bioterror event using an antibiotic resistance engineered bacterial agent may raise additional concerns. Thus, preparedness is essential to preclude and control the dissemination of the bacterial agent as well as to appropriately and promptly treat potentially exposed individuals or patients. Rates of morbidity, death, and social anxiety can be drastically reduced if the rapid delivery of antimicrobial agents for post-exposure prophylaxis and treatment is initiated as soon as possible. Availability of rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests that may provide key recommendations to targeted antibiotic treatment is mandatory, yet, such tests are only at the development stage. In this review, we describe the recently published rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests implemented on bioterror bacterial agents and discuss their assimilation in clinical and environmental samples.
Highlights
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a staggering loss of life and health, together with an economic collapse, anxiety, and social disorder
We reported on the development of a Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorter (FACS) procedure for the isolation of B. anthracis spores from environmental samples [76,77] where it was shown that by using selective antibodies for double labeling or FRET labeling of the spores, one can achieve a highly selective gate for the spores and gain a rapid collection of ca 1 × 106 spores per 10 min out of samples with spore concentration of ca 106 spores/mL with contaminants of up to 105 cfu/mL
The assay was applied on various environmental samples, outdoors as well as indoors, spiked with all three Tier-1 agents, with low to high bacterial concentrations, and was found to provide adequate MIC values, such as the ones obtained by the standard antibiotic susceptibility test (AST), albeit at remarkably shorter time frames
Summary
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a staggering loss of life and health, together with an economic collapse, anxiety, and social disorder. Y. pestis represents a serious problem for worldwide public health either through the small outbreaks of plague that occur throughout the world [11,12,13] or by its potential use, via the aerosol route of exposure, as a bioterrorism agent that might cause mass casualties [14]. The bacterium could be disseminated by aerosols leading to a high number of severe pneumonia cases and the contamination of water and soil for prolonged periods, which may cause secondary infections in human beings and animals [25,26]. Resistant strains can be selected in vitro [32,33,34,35,36], ASTs should be applied prior to treatment selection, especially following a bioterror event
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