{"id":569744,"date":"2026-07-27T02:30:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T02:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/569744\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T02:30:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T02:30:43","slug":"novel-bacterial-strains-are-implicated-in-urinary-tract-infections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/569744\/","title":{"rendered":"Novel Bacterial Strains are Implicated in Urinary Tract Infections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) can arise when too much bacteria grows in the urinary tract. Escherichia coli is a common bacterial pathogen implicated in UTIs. But a new culprit seems to be emerging as well. New research reported in mSphere<\/a> has described a novel strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that is responsible for at least 4% of UTI cases in the Gulf Coast region of the United States, a rate that is about twice as high as what has been found in the rest of the US. Previously unrecognized strains were also identified in this research.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Antibiotic resistance, which is a growing problem around the world impacting many types of bacterial pathogens and those they affect, also seems to be a problem with these novel P. aeruginosa strains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now researchers and clinicians will have to pay more attention to P. aeruginosa, which has not been a focus of UTI research.<\/p>\n

“Pseudomonas aeruginosa is relatively understudied in the UTI field compared to pathogens like E. coli,” noted Allyson Shea, Ph.D., an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of South Alabama. “Most of what we know about Pseudomonas virulence comes from lung and wound infection models, but the urinary tract is a very different environment. Our goal was to better define the genomic and phenotypic characteristics of urinary isolates specifically.”<\/p>\n

For this work, the investigators analyzed 55 samples of bacteria that had been obtained from local UTI patients. The researchers performed genetic tests and assessed how they reacted to antibiotic exposure. The genetic analysis showed that there were numerous novel strains already affecting people.<\/p>\n

“It suggests there is still substantial uncharacterized diversity among urinary P. aeruginosa isolates,” Shea said. “Many of the strains circulating in our local patient population did not match previously described sequence types, which highlights how little we still know about P. aeruginosa in the urinary tract.”<\/p>\n

About one-third of the strains identified carried resistance to common antibiotics, and were tougher to eliminate.<\/p>\n

\n

More work will be needed to determine why these infections are more common in the Gulf Coast region.<\/p>\n

“It is likely multifactorial. Factors such as climate, patient population, health care-associated exposures and underlying comorbidities may all contribute, but larger epidemiological studies would be needed to determine that,\u201d said Shea.<\/p>\n

“There are no immediate implications for patient care from this study, but we hope this work helps highlight the genomic and phenotypic diversity of P. aeruginosa strains causing UTIs. Defining that diversity is an important first step toward understanding how these infections develop and persist in the urinary tract.”<\/p>\n

Sources: University of South Alabama<\/a>, mSphere<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Urinary tract infections (UTIs) can arise when too much bacteria grows in the urinary tract. Escherichia coli is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-569744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}