Proof of Heaven

found in the stomach of a patient who died in a North Carolina hospital.
The strain immediately got the attention of doctors all over the world
when it was discovered that KPC could potentially render a bacteria that
absorbed it resistant not just to some current antibiotics, but to all of
them.
If a toxic, antibiotic-proof strain of bacteria (one whose nontoxic
cousin is ubiquitous in our bodies) got loose in the general population, it
would have a field day with the human race. There are no new antibiotics
in the ten-year pharmaceutical development pipeline that could come to
the rescue.
Just a few months earlier, Dr. Brennan knew, a patient had checked
into a hospital with a powerful bacterial infection and was given a range
of powerful antibiotics in an effort to control his Klebsiella pneumoniae
infection. But the man’s condition continued to worsen. Tests revealed
that he was still suffering from Klebsiella pneumoniae and that the
antibiotics hadn’t done their work. Further tests revealed that the bacteria
living in the man’s large intestine had acquired the KPC gene by direct
plasmid transfer from his resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae infection. In
other words, his body had provided the laboratory for the creation of a
species of bacteria that, if it got into the general population, might rival
the Black Death, a plague that killed off half of Europe in the fourteenth
century.
The hospital where all this occurred was the Sourasky Medical Center
in Tel Aviv, Israel, and it had occurred just a few months previously. As a
matter of fact it happened at about the time that I’d been there, as part of
my work coordinating a global research initiative in focused ultrasound
brain surgery. I’d arrived in Jerusalem at 3:15 A.M. and after finding my
hotel had decided on a whim to walk to the old city. I ended up taking a
lone predawn tour of the Via Dolorosa and visiting the alleged site of the
Last Supper. The trip had been strangely moving, and once back in the
States I’d often brought it up with Holley. But at the time I’d known
nothing of the patient at the Sourasky Medical Center, or the bacteria he
contracted that picked up the KPC gene. Bacteria that, it developed, was
itself a strain of E. coli.