Impact of mcr-1 harbouring bacteria in clinical settings and the public health sector: how can we act against this novel threat?

Recently, Quan et al. [2017] published a comprehensive multicentre longitudinal study in which they demonstrate that the mcr-1 colistin resistance gene is only sporadically detectable in Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae from patients with bloodstream infections in China, but untraceable in clinical isolates of the medical important bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter spp. In the study, the authors could not attribute undesirable effects of the mcr-1 occurrence to any of the clinical outcomes of the infected patients. However, taking into account the low mcr-1 prevalence in the analysed target bacteria, the threat of the novel resistance gene to clinical and public health is not conclusively assessable and needs further investigations (1).