Image captured with an electron micrograph shows magnified clumps of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. (HO, Canadian Press)

Scientists are looking at diverse sources — such as soil and frog skins — for new antibiotics, worried that doctors will run out of options to treat increasingly antibiotic-resistant infections.

Doctors fear they may exhaust their antibiotic treatment options because simple infections could become medical emergencies if there are no longer drugs to treat them.

At age 30, Stephanie Verge of Toronto became infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of staph known as MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, after a same-day gynecological procedure.

Verge ended up taking six different antibiotics, at least two of them more than once, for 74 days. She said she suffered painful boils, vertigo, nausea and memory lapses from MRSA. It commonly causes skin infections but can also lead to surgical wound infections, pneumonia, and infections in the bloodstream and bone.

To find new antibiotics for infections such as MRSA, researcher Gerry Wright at McMaster University in Hamilton is culturing bacteria from soil across Canada, looking for something that might lead to a new drug.

At his lab, Wright has thousands of petri dishes of bacterial cultures he's testing for use as potential antibiotics.

Not an easy search

When Alexander Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945, he sent out a warning, noting that resistant bacteria grew on the penicillin he discovered.

"I think there was an age of complacency that set in the '60s," regarding the value of antibiotics, said biochemist Eric Brown, of McMaster University.

"So there's been a renaissance in the last 10 to 15 years in drug discovery now using much more modern methods. It takes considerable time to find a new antibiotic, and it's proven to be not as easy as we might have thought."

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Eric Marsh has come up with a compound that might work, taken from the skin of the African clawed frog. He's waiting for funding to take it to the next step.

"There's much more money to be made in a pill or something that you're going to take every day of your life for lowering cholesterol or depression, or all those kinds of things," Marsh said.

Even if drug companies step up efforts to develop replacement drugs immediately, the World Health Organization says some diseases will have no effective therapies within 10 years.