
Laboratorians, CDC notes, play a key role in finding "unusual" AR before it becomes common. This helps response teams investigate in an effort to stop spread and protect people from difficult-to-treat infections. More than 23,000 Americans die annually from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant germs.
A recent CDC Vital Signs report highlights the importance of rapid detection by laboratorians, the critical first step in containing novel or targeted multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs).
Within this report is data from the CDC's AR Lab Network, a resource established in 2016 designed to help identify and characterize resistance in threats like "nightmare bacteria" carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), emerging fungal threats like Candida auris and other pathogens.
The AR Lab Network helped uncover unusual resistance genes in nightmare bacteria more than 220 times in 2017.