The New York Times reported a month ago that "Salmonella: Drug-Resistant Strain of Bacteria Gains in Africa, With High Death Rates."  Apparently, yet another new drug-resistant strain of bacteria has emerged in the last decade in Africa and is causing unusual numbers of deaths there according to British and African researchers.  The strain, a drug-resistant Salmonella, ST313, has emerged in Africa.  The strain, a variant of Salmonella typhimurium, is named ST313. Its genome was decoded by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and researchers in Kenya and Malawi.

Salmonella normally circulates in animals and reaches humans via food poisoning. (Consumer Reports a week ago that two-thirds of the chickens it had tested had campylobacter or salmonella, though not of this new strain.)

But after sequencing the bacterial DNA found in about 50 Africans with severe infections, the researchers said the ST313 strain appeared to be mutating to circulate in humans independently of animals, as, for example, drug-resistant staph infections now do.

ST313 “has rapidly gained resistance to many of the commonly used antibiotics in the field,” said Dr. Chisomo Msefula, a researcher, and the multi-drug-resistant form seems to be becoming dominant in parts of Africa as antibiotics knock out competitors.