Shigella is America's Newest Drug-Resistant Bug

An intestinal illness carried by international travelers is spreading across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that the bacteria Shigella sonnei has become resistant to ciprofloxacin, the antibiotic that used to shorten the illness it caused and lessen its severity.

This is the first time we've documented this large an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant (shigella) linked to international travel," said Dr. Anna Bowen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency identified 243 cases of shigellosis in 32 states and Puerto Rico. Testing 126 of them, officials determined that 109 cases were resistant to antibiotics.

Shigella causes an estimated 500,000 cases of diarrhea each year, according to the CDC. It's commonly associated with traveling outside the United States, but 95 cases were recently reported as part of an outbreak among the San Francisco homeless population.

The rest of the world has been dealing with this antibiotic resistant strain for years, said Dr. Amy Edwards, an infectious disease specialist at U.H. Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, adding that it's not surprising that it's finally reached the United States.

"This is the next story on yet another bug that has developed resistance to multiple antibiotics," said Dr. William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "In addition, it's a global problem because people are traveling abroad acquiring this bug with multiple resistant aspects and bringing it back to us and spreading it in the United States. So there are several new twists about this."

 "Shigella is a bug that's spread from person to person very, very readily," Schaffner said. "It doesn't take much of the bug to initiate an infection, and it produces quite an unpleasant diarrheal illness."