The "post-antibiotic" world has claimed its first American victim and if the horror stories about the deadliness of multi-drug resistant pathogens or superbugs are half true, the U.S. could be in for an unprecedented health crisis with the spread of superbugs impervious to antibiotics.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the first confirmed case of an American being infected by a superbug that resisted all forms of antibiotic treatment. It said this superbug -- a strain of E. coli -- even withstood the antibiotic colistin, the last ditch defense against "nightmare bacteria" such as this one. 

CDC said this superbug infected an unidentified 49-year-old woman from Pennsylvania undergoing treatment for a simple urinary tract infection. It said the patient had not traveled within the prior five months and is at a loss as to how this woman was infected.

CDC said the superbug that infected the American woman was itself first infected with a small piece of DNA called a "plasmid" that passed along a gene called "mcr-1" that causes resistance to colistin.

The mcr-1 gene was discovered last year in people and pigs in China.

"(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA," said a study first conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.

The study pushed for continued surveillance of the mcr-1 gene to determine the true extent of the gene in the United States.

"We risk being in a post-antibiotic world," said CDC director Thomas Frieden.

CDC said the speed of this superbug's spread won't be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how widespread the colistin-resistant superbug is in the U.S. and in other countries worldwide.

"It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained," said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

The potential for the superbug to spread from animals to people is a major concern, said Cassell.

Cassell said people can best protect themselves from it and other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands; washing fruits and vegetables very well and preparing foods safely.

Colistin (polymyxin E) is a last-resort antibiotic for superbugs such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a cause of fatal sepsis) and Klebsiella pneumonia (a cause of pneumonia, wound or surgical site infections).

Resistance to colistin, however, has been identified in the Escherichia coli strain SHP45 carried by the mcr-1 gene, the first plasmid-mediated polymyxin resistance mechanism.

Often associated with infected meat and dairy products, E. coli has strains that also cause severe anemia or kidney failure that can lead to death. Researchers found that drug resistant E. coli, malaria and tuberculosis stand to become the greatest killers of humans by 2050.

The worldwide epidemic of deaths unleashed by antibiotic resistant superbugs has taken the lives of some one million persons since the middle of 2014 and is expected to kill a person every three seconds by 2050. 

Bacterial antibiotic resistance poses the largest threat to public health in the world. A World Health Organization (WHO) report released April 2014 said this "serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country."

Tagssuperbugs, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nightmare bacteria, mcr-1 gene, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, post-antibiotic world