• Question: what type of 'bad bugs' do you create your medicine for?

    Asked by to Daren on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Excellent question. There are 4 main types of bug (or bacteria) that we study in our lab:
      Yersinia pestis – which causes the plague!
      Bacillus anthracis – which spreads anthrax!
      Burkholderia pseudomallei – which can cause a nasty disease called melioidosis.
      Francisella tularensis – which cause another horrible disease called tularemia.

      We are interested in these bugs as they are particularly deadly and could be used as biological weapons by terrorists. The way we are looking at creating new medicines for treating these bugs means that any medicine we find could be effective against other bugs such as ones that you might find in hospitals which can be harmful to patients who are recovering from operations etc. It is really important that we find new medicines to treat these infections as the bugs are becoming resistant to the medicines we have.

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