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Soil Bacteria Show High Resistance to Antibiotics
Miraba writes "Microbiologists have found that soil-dwelling bacteria are highly resistant to antibiotics, even ones that they've never been exposed to before. While this information suggests that superbugs could arise from these bacteria, it also provides the opportunity for testing new techniques in drug development for the future."
And now I have to give up eating dirt!
I guess I'll become a Breatharian...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
And here is silly ol' me trying to infect myself with bacteria.
http://www.activia.ca/
Works for me...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Mud doesn't get infections.
The specualtion about super bugs seems misplaced. So far antibiotics work quite well, albeit with limited lifespans of usefulness before resistance is induced. If dreaded "super bugs" were goinf to emerge from soils they would already exist or would have come about from these resistant bugs already. It has not happened.
Taking a wild ass guess I would be unsurprised if it turned out that the reason soil based bugs show such resistance is because some other bug is already using this antibiotic and they had to develop resistance to survive. For example, look at Penicilin which is naturually produced by mold presumably for this very reason: to kill bacteria.
So this has been going on millions of years before we came along. If a super bug was going to out there we would have found it already.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime, something's gonna' getcha'
I am not really surprised that soil bacteria are incredibly hardy. Remember that Bacillus anthracis (or Anthrax) is a bacterium that is endemic to soil. It is an incredibly hardy bacterium that can last as a spore in the right conditions for years (literally decades). Bacteria that live in the soil live in a hostile environment, to which they will develop methods of immunity. If a bacteria can live in soil, which is a hostile environment then one might guess that the same bacteria could handle the relatively "easy-to-live-in" human body. It is also interesting to note that many of our antibiotics are derivied from organisms that fight off bacterial infection. These same organims are prevalent in the soil. I am not sure what the big surprise is here?
Funny, the first thing that popped into my head when I thought about this was BIOWEAPON.
What do you think the first thought that pops into Kim Jong Il's head is going to be? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The DoE? Gotta be pre-emptive, ya know....
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Alligator/Crocodile blood anyone? They live in swampy places, fight even each other, and do not seem to get infections. (Well, not as easily as humans anyway ...)
Here is just one link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4155522.stm
One has to wonder if the soil-dwelling bacteria have a natural resistance to antibacterial agents, or if it evolved over the course of the last half century. We pump farm animals full of antibiotics that they don't really need, and said animals produce extraordinary amounts of solid waste full of highly diluted antibiotics and their metabolites. This waste becomes fertilizer, which means it's spread over huge surface areas where it leaches into the ground.
Could constant low-level exposure to antibiotics be responsible for the resistance?
Topic says it all. Different pH, temperature, humidity, ... Bacteria, fungi (etc) that thrive in the ground usually don't like it as much in a hot, warm and nearly neutral human body. We don't have a lot of things that work very well on fungi (heck, most of our antibiotics come from fungi), but they don't represent a large danger, simply because our insides are usually a bit too warm for them. Let's not panic too early.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Studies have shown that eating dirt is, in fact, unhealthy.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
There is a touch irony here. The major justification for non-socialized medicine like that in the United States is that private enterprise will provide the economic rewards which will spur innovation in developing new drugs. However, what happens when the capitalistic system does not provide the necessary rewards?
Such is the case with new antibiotics. Typically, patients take antibiotics for a week and never consume the stuff again until the next infection arises. By contrast, drugs treating chronic conditions like excessive cholesterol are consumed daily and hence provide signficant financial rewards. As a result, American companies have abandoned the development of new antibiotics in favor of drugs treating chronic conditions.
What is the point of using superbugs in the soil to test the efficacy of new antibiotics when Americans companies are not developing new antibiotics?
Then again, in the end, we are all dead.
An antibiotic is a drug that kills or slows the growth of bacteria. Antibiotics are one class of antimicrobials, a larger group which also includes anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-parasitic drugs. They are relatively harmless to the host, and therefore can be used to treat infections. The term, coined by Selman Waksman, originally described only those formulations derived from living organisms, in contradistinction to "chemotherapeutic agents", which were purely synthetic. Nowadays the term "antibiotic" is also applied to synthetic antimicrobials, such as the sulfonamides. Antibiotics are small molecules with a molecular weight less than 2000. They are not enzymes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotics
Full Tilt
Just like weeds picking up resistance to herbicides. With the rampant application of weed killer, we're actually breeding tougher weeds.
There's a reason they survive. It's because they're tough and adaptable. Sets up an interesting situation. We depend on modern herbicides and pesticides to maintain the food production it takes to feed a planet that's already over-crowded. But the weeds and insects we're trying to kill aren't sissies. At some point the chemicals we have to use to kill them are start going to take a toll on us.
Or maybe they already are.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well, if no one does, then someone will, because the profit will be enormous without competition. And then someone else will come in with a cheaper antibiotic, with a lower profit margin.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I instantly thought of this when I read the headline. I'm sure you've seen the studies. The ones that say that the average tap water has X-particles per million of Prozac, X-particle per million of Xanax, etc. The point being that human beings consume large amounts of medicine and then much of them gets excreted out somehow and eventually (and unfortunately) find their way into the ecosystem. Our water and probably our land. So a study like this makes me wonder (and feel free to club me over the head if this is impossible, because I'm just a programmer, not a a biologist) if it's possible that as we use more and more antibiotics on ourselves, on cows and chickens in large amounts, if at some point these don't make their way into the system and possibly help promote a more aggressive evolution of these superbugs. I would like to see a study done on that if there isn't already a definitive answer to *that* question.
So much for "God made dirt & dirt don't hurt."
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I was recently considering entering graduate school, and one of the fellowships I was looking at was for a study examining very nearly this topic- the effect of antibacterial-contaminated runnoff from farms on soil and watershed bacteria, with a possible extension into effects on the digestive flora of aquatic life. I didn't take it, but it seemed like a very interesting and important subject. If it's made it into the mainstream press already, though, I would have been facing a pretty limited opportunity for publishing. I'm glad the information's out there! Maybe this wll help make clear the importance of more limited prophylactic antibiotic use.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
Could the natural resistance of soil bacteria to antibiotics result from the natural presence of antibiotics in soil?
Penicillin, the quintessential antibiotic, is derived from mold. Suppose that the molds and bacteria are battling it out in the soil, and the molds attack the bacteria with antibiotics, so then the bacteria evolve resistance to those antibiotics.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The specualtion about super bugs seems misplaced. So far antibiotics work quite well, albeit with limited lifespans of usefulness before resistance is induced...
True enough, but the problem is that this induction of resistance is being seriously accelerated by massive abuse and oversubscription of antibiotics. Using anti biotics on a large scale in agriculture for example may be profitable but it has also ruined several drugs that could otherwise still be used to treat humans. Similarly massive 'convenience subscription' of antibiotics in cases that were not all that serious, just to get somebody to work a couple of days earlyer or save them a bit of discomfort, has also contributed to creating resistant bacteria. And this does not just go for anti bacterial drugs. The Chinese managed to wreck several antiviral drugs in the sense that they are probably useless for treating bird flu by using them on chickens. Trying to argue that human abuse of these drugs has not contributed to the on the emergance of superbugs is silly.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well I am glad that the Boston Globe, pinnacle of science that it is has deemed antibiotics to be a dead field. I would say that this cannot be more wrong. Not only are antibacterials being actively sought I have first hand knowledge of this fact. Private industry and the government have poured millions into finding vaccinations, antimicrobials, and many other biological elements of disease resistance. Your statement is wrong at best and intentionally misleading at worst. The most hilarious part is that the US is by FAR the leading country in this tpye of research. This is why everyone and their mother in the fields of immunology, microbiology, and biotechnology, wants a PhD from a US institution. This is why my boss gets at least 20 emails a week from people outside the US wanting to join our lab, despite the fact that it is very small.
Organisms living in soil are exposed to numerous chemicals and other species, it's a wonder that they're not immune to even more antibiotics and disinfectant chemicals.
In reality, it's not a matter of "immune". There only needs to be enough of a resistance that the process of evolution can take place. Letting the bacteria multiply, even slowly, will eventually create complete resistance.
But soil bacteria were the major *SOURCE* of soil bacteria after penecillin was discovered... of *COURSE* they are resistant, they are the source of many of those drugs.
meh
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just read the article, and, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The soil beneath us has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of antibotic-resistant bacteria. It's difficult to tell from this discussion point whether they will consume the captive ants or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the superbugs will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new microscopic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground plague nurseries.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime, something's gonna' getcha'
In related news, humans are mortal. News at 11.
I agree that this is a fairly sizeable problem with capitalism. But, considering the reality of the problem, you can hardly blame them for their reluctance.
Let's use an analogy from Star Trek. Imagine that we're using our phasers, photon cannons or whatnot to fight off the Borg. Any given setting for our weapons is only effective for a few shots. To stay effective in this fight, we need to use a variety of weapons with a variety of settings between them. Variability wins while too much repetition is death.
Now imagine that it takes weeks, if not months or years to recalibrate weapons. Even worse, imagine that the same resistance that the Borg get is quickly passed on to the Vulcans, Ferengi, Klingons, and everyone else out there who wants it.
Why invest the money when the enemy is frighteningly more adept at avoiding our weapons than we are at making new ones? It's a losing battle.
This is the state of our current battle against bacterial disease. Our antibiotic weapons become obsolete before they really have a chance to become effective. Investment fizzles by default. This is why we still don't have any magic bullets against disease. Even unrelated bacteria can share their armor with the Darwin-defying trick called plasmids. Ironically, the place where the most pestilent and resistant bacteria can be found is in hospitals. The constant barrage of disinfectants and antibiotics they receive there makes them the most dangerous ones to contract. In my opinion, the next super-bug is much more likely to come from a hospital than it is to come from the soil. (Metabolic barriers are much harder to overcome than resistance ones.)
In short, this is why so little corporate capital is being invested in antibiotics, or vaccines for that matter. The only probable return on investment they derive from it is an improved reputation in the public eye. Sadly, even that will likely fizzle as quickly as does the effectiveness of the product.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
If you've ever grown mushrooms indoors and had some contamination, its quite amazing to see that if you throw them outside the contamination clears up and the mushrooms can still grow.
Outside is a hostile area for bactera, molds etc
Quite an interesting phenomenon.
On a sidenote, the flushing of antibiotics is contributing to the superbug problem. Flushing of any drug is bad (for example, traces of Prozac have been detected in London's water supply, traces of cocaine have been found in Italy's), but here's the question. How do you get rid of them? This has all the makings of a new cheech and chong movie.
If history serves as any indicator, the country you have to worry about using a weapon of mass destruction will be the United States.
If you research where antibiotics come from, where drug companies have for 50 years or more looked for new antibiotics, it's in the dang soil!
yes, scientists figured out long ago to not just set out pertri dishes and hope for new varieties of spores to come to them-- they've gone out into the world collecting soil and the concomitant spores. IIRC the majority of antibiotics in use were found in the soil of various places, all over the world.
Nothing new here.
Not being in the biological sciences, I have a question then for those who are.
Does this mean that our kids should play in the dirt (and occasionally eat a bit), to develop immunity, or that they shouldn't, because antibiotics may not help them if they get sick from it?
You dont have to cut them out of your diet. Just be aware of the quality and only buy the best.
:)
Look for "No hormones, no antibiotics, grain fed" etc. Something along those lines. "All Natural" has a very general legal definition, so you need to ignore that. Its more of a marketing gimmic.
Usually you are looking at at least double the cost, but the meat is noticably tastier, and has fewer heath worries.
When eating out, avoid all fast food meat, that includes subs and pizza. That stuff can get downright dangerous, they dont test for a lot of nasties, including Bovine-CJD.
Chances are, a lot of people already have it. I think its going to be a worldwide pandemic. Hell, I might already have it as I didnt start eating healthy until 3 years ago. I had been avoiding fast food burgers for a good decade now, but i was a big pizza/subs guy. All you needed to do was pick up a chance infected prion and boom, you are on a slow yucky 15 year decline.
The only way to tell if someone died from it is to test the brain tissue after death, and they dont normally test for it anyways.
Anyways, unsafe factory farming is the cause of this. Recycling dead animals as feed, high stress condition, pumped with growth hormones and antibiotics, it just doesnt make for quality meat. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to see the problem here. Factory-style farming CAN be done properly There are several companies that do. You just need to be aware.
Oh yeah. I wouldnt worry about the local water, chances are its fine. Genetically engineered fruits and veggies are often delicious and inexpensive due to super-high outputs. I buy that stuff all the time. Just make sure you wash your fruits and veggies well.
I thought the green and glowing pigs were awesome. Go science
Keep fish in small quantities. Its still mostly okay, as long as you dont eat tons at a time. Yeah, output is down, but price reflects that.
The only thing your post missed was to watch out for high fructose corn syrup. Try to limit your intake. Its in a lot of things you wouldnt realize. Read your labels!
-end crazy hippie ranting-
... you just have to trust your immune system. The whole "hygienic" germ-free hysteria that our culture promotes (and which has been promoted for many years by many corporations that sell relevant products) is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you don't eat some dirt as a kid, you won't ever develop the appropriate defenses.
/. readership is probably engineer-types, and that is engineer thinking. Biology is way, way more complicated. ;-) I feel like I'm one of the few biologists/ecologists here...
:-)
If you don't grovel around in the real world and exercise the ol' immune system, you'll have all kinds of allergies and asthma and whatnot. When I was a kid... oh, never mind. No, DO mind. When I was a kid, hardly anyone had allergies, or asthma, or ear-aches, or any of that crap.
Blanket overuse of antibiotics is exactly the same as pesticides and herbicides ending up with pesticide and herbicide resistant pests and weeds. You can't just make "negative" manifestations of nature go away like that. Most of the
Anyway, e.g., the polio outbreak of the 40's and 50's was actually due largely to too much cleanliness. Very young children would typically develop resistance to the (totally ubiquitous, endemic) polio virus in earlier times (via eating dirt), but "modern" notions of hygiene precluded this.
So, eat dirt or die!
- sgage
I hate to belabor the obvious, but it's no wonder soil bacteria are resistant to antibiotics: they live in close proximity with the same fungi that evolved antibiotic chemicals to combat them. While we humans are doing a pretty poor job of judiciously using antibiotics and we are probably creating some real long-term problems by polluting the environment with antibiotics and disinfectants, we shouldn't forget that we didn't invent antibiotics, we discovered them. There are going to be lots of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics simply because they evolved in an environment rich in fungi that produce them.
If you want to worry about antibiotic resistant bacteria capable of causing disease in humans, hospitals are a much bigger breeding ground than soil, which harbors innumerable species of bacteria that are harmless to us or even beneficial agriculturally, and only a few that can do us harm.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Soil bacteria is responsible for cleaning a lot of the water we dump onto the ground. Any organic solids in the water are digested by the bacteria, and the water recharges aquifers. It's drawn out again years later as clean as can be.
This process is recreated by tertiary wastewater treatment plants where bacteria is added to sewer water to digest all the solids. The bacteria are then coagulated with a chemical such as alum and they are allowed to settle out of the water. This treated water is then disinfected by chlorine, chloramine, UV light, or some other method, and is then reused as irrigation water. It's actually clean enough to be used as drinking water, but safety concerns and common sense advise against this.
Well we do put chemicals into our soil either if it's to kill weed or some to grow grass my only guess is that after years of exposure to such chemicals is what makes them very resistant to antibiotics wether it be in a direct or indirect way.
A few years ago I was working in my garden and my leg started itching, there was a small red dot mid-calf and minor swelling around it. I figured it was a bug bite. Within an hour the entire calf had turned red and was warm to the touch. I made a trip to Urgent Care and the doctor perscribed an anti-biotic and told me to go home and soak the leg in the hottest water I could stand. The next day I went into see my own doctor, by now my calf looked like an over-cooked hot dog and I was afraid the skin was litterally going to split open.
They drew blood and attempted to locate some pus to drain but found that it was not in sacks but more or less distributed though the leg (so the attempt to lance did not result in much drainage). I was given another kind of anti-biotic and was told to continue with the frequent hot water soaks. This time the anti-biotic seemed to help because the swelling started to reduce but soon enough, the swelling started up again and I found myself back in the clinic. This time my leg had started to lose it's pulse and my foot was grayish. They ran an anti-biotic in through an IV and had me elevate my leg for a few hours in the clinic. I was given another perscription and sent home with instructions to keep my leg elevated and to give it more hot soaks. I was told to come in to be checked the following day and to cancel any plans that I had for the weekend. These last anti-biotics worked and the swelling in my leg stayed down. The following day, I dutifully returned to the doctor and was told that had the swelling not shown such dramatic improvment, I would have lost my leg.
Through all of this, I never ended up in the hospital. I was treated with a barage of very powerful anti-biotics (the same exact ones that they use for "flesh eating bacteria") and my doctor told me that the bug I had was very closely related to that bug, he said that it was soil-borne and probably entered the skin though a bug bite.
I was even able to keep my weekend plans but I did not walk much and had to keep the leg up a lot (I went camping but not too far away). It took well over a year for my leg to return to it's normal color and I lost some tissue below the skin, these "things" are still with me (the best that I can describe it is it is like a scar underneath the skin, you can see some roughness in the skin and there is a different texture to the area but all the muscles and everything seem just fine.
I think my experience brings out the best and the worst of the HMO style medical system. I'm pretty confident that had I had a regular kind of insurance, I would have been in the hospital. On the other hand, the clinic was well staffed and had access to the right lab equipment and drugs to treat me. I'm glad it came out like it did and I really have to credit my doctors for everything that they did. They saved my leg.
Antibiotics haven't been around a long time, biologically speaking. So we have no way to know if the biosphere is stable to their "sudden" (over the last 50 years) introduction.
The point is that dumping antibiotics into the biosphere, as we have been doing for 50 years, not just by treating infection but in animal feed, antibacterial soaps, et cetera, may be having just as large-scale and important effects as dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We don't know how fast the bugs are going to evolve resistance to them, or how it will spread (as another responder noted, bacteria exchange genes with each other, so the fact that a given species doesn't infect humans itself doesn't mean it won't acquire the genes, mutate them, and pass them on).
We don't know how we are changing the heretofore stable relationship between bacteria and the rest of the animal kingdom. Hopefull, we are doing nothing much, or at least nothing we can't deal with. But time will tell.
Hey my SO is a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, and she sees kids die of multiple-drug-resistant infections all the time. I think your optimism is not justified.
This could be a great new game. SimDirt.
So basically once you get beyond all the mombo jumbo, what these guys are are looking to do is; find a way to develop anti-bacterial agents capable of killing microbes and their their cousins. Noble in effort but overlooks one fundamental problem. What happens when these agents start attacking the very same or similar microbs and bacteria that are essential to the growth of plants? Theres no way they can guarantee those agents will not. A disaster waiting to happen.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
www.evergreen.edu/phage/phagetherapy/phagetherapy. htm
0 6/index.html
t ml
Phages, as I understand it, are made from human waste, and are highly effective and many pharm-farms are after their own bugggies right now. Russians favorite shit for infections, no pun intended.
Read the book darwins radio by greg bear (I think) for more info put across in an enjoyable but well researched manner. The comedian Gallagher, talking about hotdogs: you people gotta get some of this inya, if you stay pure all your life, one day youre going to be at a ballgame or something, and get one of these things, it gonna lay your ass out dead....
Which is true. Also remember the greatest weapon against any bioproblem is sunlight and bleach. If you are in a situation where there has been an exposure you can create a positive pressure atmosphere for several hours with a scuba tank in a car with thte windows closed; barely open the tank and it will keep positive pressure until it runs out, and nothing will get in. Sunlight kills all bioweapons -- visit sunshine-project.org. also visit www.cancersalves.com -- its just good for you to know.
some links about enmod, which incorporates aspects of biotech in its weaponized versions....
http://www.luxefaire.com/19/index.html
http://www.luxefaire.com/lordsburganimastenna0121
http://www.luxefaire.com/undulatusantenna/index.h
Good luc.
b
ps the writer of this article comes across as some kind of naieve mammys boy...
Light Happens.
I had an incident of severe antibiotic resistant Staph A. Took over 6 months to beat it, nip and tuck a few times. It's like...you could croak, easy. It was very painful, I still have scars from it, and this was years ago, I can't imagine how bad it is today, other than I have seen pictures of the victims. It hits quick, you literally rot in front of your eyes, and the antibiotics available more or less *don't work now*.
You don't want to get it. The future of "superbugs" is here now and is going to be getting worse, and quickly, go google it.
As far as immunity and resistance, I chose my words poorly :P Sorry about that.
With regard to antibiotics and other drugs I simply did not distinguish , since we were on the subject of antibiotics.
Being in the military they issue out antibiotics like candy. Keflex, Penecillin, Amoxicillin, Z-Max, and some of the other stronger ones. Something that is clearly viral will still receive meds that will do nothing to fight the infection itself (that's how I understand it). It is free for us and doctors/medics just put them out there to make their job easier and to process patients more quickly. It's as easy as going to the store and getting Over The Counter drugs.
It may not be as prevalent outside military life, but many doctors still presribe antibio's for illnesses which will not benefit the patient. Not to discredit people in the medical field, but as everywhere some individuals just don't know how to do their jobs properly, or choose not to for the sake of ease.
I'm attempting to stay somewhat on topic here, so I'll not get into an agrument of ethics and personal health. 'Nuff said.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
That is somewhat older inaccurate news now, although popular to keep repeating. The use of antibiotics in feed or as supplements is _much_ lower today than it was in years past. There are a plethora of newish laws that regulate it better, plus it's *very* expensive, plus it is not so effective. Believe me, farmers don't want to use them if at all possible. They are only used as last ditch "save the farm" attempts, it isn't normal day to day in all the animal feed, and they are pretty restricted as to type and dosage, etc. it's a good way to go broke or go to jail if you abuse the system.. On the other hand, OUTSIDE the US, use of antibiotics in animals and highly poisonous sprays (stuff completely banned for ANY use in the USA) on food is very high. Most of south america, asia,and africa have little to no regulations or oversight. Europe and Canada and the US in the west and Oz, NZ and Japan in the east are about the only places that even bother to have any regulations of note and actually try to enforce those regs.
Inside the US, the most common way that antibiotics and other drugs get into the environment is from humans. Waste water treatment plants do hardly anything to remove those sources. Some of the worst offenders are tranquilizers, and birth control hormones. In the soil, it's anything goes. A lot of places routinely dry human waste treated "sludge" and use it as fertilizer in such places as city parks and golf courses, etc. You get some nice concentrated heavy metals then too, yummy!
I will not deny that current agricultural practices are a source, but I think they are not the primary source.
With this info out there, Bush's FDA will immeadiatly announce that all resistance is caused by nature and that we can go back to unrestricted use of anti-biotics. In addition, he will be encouraging the development in China or by Oil companies.
Ira Flatow (yes, of Newton's Apple fame) covered this on the latest edition of Science Friday. They have the segment available as an MP3. (The whole weekly show is also available as a podcast at feed://www.sciencefriday.com/audio/scifriaudio.xml if you're interested)
The infectious bacteria on this planet are very quickly becoming anti-biotic resistant because humans gulp down anti-biotics for damn well anything (north Americans especially). You go see a doctor and complain about having a bad sore throat, they will probably throw some anti-biotic your way. The ironic part is that anti-biotics actually kill the beneficial flora in your intestinal tract that is used to maintain a strong immune system and kill off bad infectious bugs that infest us in the first place. In alternative medicine thinking, the main steps in combating an infectious bacteria based disease is to use high doses of PRO-BIOTICS (which fortify the bodies flora as well as using silver colloidal which is lethal to germs and bad bacteria while keeping the good bacteria intact. In fact alot of hospitals use it where common anti-biotics fail. There are even natural anti-biotics which are way less taxing on the system such as garlic concentrate, olive leaf and grapefruit seed extract
n se.shtml/
Another interesting thing to note is the fact that there are some very powerful bacteria found in the earth that will strongly fortify human flora. These are known as homeostatic soil organisms. This company makes such a product:
http://www.gardenoflifeusa.com/detail_primal_defe
Does this mean we would do well to be offering aid in the form of shoes and perhaps encouraging paved walkways in poorer countries?
Sometimes, in difficult to treat cases, doctors will prescribe what my mom always called "Napalm" antibiotics, that is, antibiotics that are so strong that they kill everything, including the "good" bacteria lactobacillus acidophilus in the intestines, and the result? The worst imaginable liquid, dripping, "hershey squirts", "green apple two-step" diarrhea.
If the good bacteria aren't replenished soon enough, it allows the yeast candida albicans that is also present in the intestines to grow unchecked. Normally the good bacteria crowd out the yeast, but when the bacteria are killed off by antibiotics, there is an overgrowth of the yeast, since most antibiotics don't kill yeast. The overgrowth of yeast releases toxins that damage the intestinal lining, mimicking intestinal conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, celiac sprue, Crohn's disease, and lactose intolerance, and causing a whole host of other problems such as vaginal yeast infections in women, prostatitis in men, athlete's foot, fingernail and toenail infections, etc. (Go do a web search on "candida overgrowth syndrome" or "candidiasis".)
The good bacteria acidophilus is the bacteria culture used to make yogurt, and can also be found in probiotic supplements (look in the vitamin and supplement aisle at health food stores). Contrary to the FUD in the article, some bacteria from soil is beneficial, as they are sometimes incorporated into the probiotic supplements to help kill off the yeast overgrowth.
I was thinking the same thing. Molds would be common in soils and molds produce the compounds we use as antibiotics... so why wouldn't there be soil bacteria that are naturally resistant?
There must be lots of old soils samples around - why not take samples of soils that were taken prior to the antibiotic era (before the 40's or so) and see if they don't get the same result?
Since most of the antibiotics are related to secretions from molds like penicillin, soil bacteria probably encounter them much more than parasitic bacteria in animals would.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A lot of soil contains some particularly nasty molds that generate serious biotoxins. Many mycotoxins, Lyme disease, some aquatic microorganisms, and several other biotoxin diseases have similar effects in the body.. especially in people who have certain HLA-DR types. Those people don't eliminate these toxins and, as I have heard, they become locked in the body by being trapped in a loop between the liver, bile salts, and small intestine.. They can cause serious damage to your health. If you have mold-related illness, Lyme, or any of these other diseases you may not even know it, but they could be making you seriously ill (this is the situation I was in..) I found out that a drug called cholestyramine helped a lot.. literally sucking the toxins out of this loop that I described earlier. It made a huge difference for me. There is a lot of info on this at moldwarriors.com and chronicneurotoxins.com . Mold toxicity is a serious (and politically controversial.. watch people flame me on this!) problem and so is Lyme disease.. this approach seems to be a real breakthrough.. so save this info if you know someone who needs it.
There is a very good reason that the a large number of soil organisms are resistant to antibiotics.
All antibiotics used today have originated or have been derived from natural sources. Don't think for a minute that resistance to penicillin came about since humans started using it, oh no, bacteria have been protecting themselves against natural antibiotics for eons. Humans did not invent antibiotics nature/God/life invented them. So finding resistance in nature should not be suprising.
Soil bacteria should especially be used to defending themselves against antibiotics because they make antibiotics themselves. The majority of all antibiotics used to day have been developed from products made by the family of bacteria called Actinomyces (spelling?), especially from the genus Streptomyces. Drugs like Streptomycin, and penicillin are naturally found in soil, made by these bacteria, and these bacteria certainly don't kill themselves, their resistant to their own offences.
Don't be too weary of resistant soil germs, most of them are harmless (except anthrax and a few), the most dangerous bacteria are probably living on your face right now (Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomons aeriginosa)..
Mike Jones-{ Genetic Engineer, in Training }-
The advice for today: don't soil yourself.
See also http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bacteriophages
Can humans make it?
With the disgusting abuse of anti-biotics in the US (people get anti-biotics for colds all the time... what for? Colds are viruses???!), soon everything will be immune to anti-biotics. Then we will certainly be back to dealing with bacteria the old fashioned way: survive naturally or become extinct.
Before humans came on the scene to kill off species for no good reason, there were 3 things you could count on to escape extinction (none of which do humans have):
1. reproduce so quickly and in such vast numbers that odds are very good some offspring will survive any big changes in the environment. e.g. various insects, which have been around forever. Like cockroaches becoming immune to many poisons after a few generations.
Humans breed like viruses in a way, but much much much slower. We don't qualify here.
2. be really tough and immune to a lot of germs. e.g. the croc family have natural anti-bodies in their blood that kick the majority of infection's butts, and they've been around since the dinosaur time.
Humans tough? No, but our shelters help. Immune to a lot? I don't think so. I think we're getting less tough and less immune to things by overworking and living in cities.
3. live in a isolated place where the environment rarely changes. e.g. the coelacanth, a fish at the bottom of the ocean that were around since before the dinosaurs. Even if continents move, the sun is blocked by ash, tropical rain forests produce a thousand venomous snakes, spiders, and bugs... you will still be in the "safe" environment at the bottom of the ocean.
Shelters protect us from a little rain and snow, but when the meterorite hits, we'll be toast. One day we may get a new super disease that pops up and spreads all over the world via airliners... we're not isolated enough by any strech of the imagination.
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So, can humans make it? I dunno... we seem to be getting really good at screwing up the world lately. Pretty soon i am afraid we'll screw it up enough to screw ourselves over.
HSOs (Homeostatic soil bacteria) are already in use as a form of probiotics, and widely advocated by individuals such as Jordan Rubin (who had a very severe form a Crohn's himself). There are many suffers of diseases such as Crohn's and IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) who seem to have been helped by them, but more research is necessary.
s _2002_Nov/ai_93736412
See:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/i
Storm
..of antimicrobial drug resistance fall into three main types.(from genomebiology.com) First, simply develop new drugs. The post-genomic era has led to the discovery of a whole host of essential genes in bacteria whose products might represent targets for novel antimicrobial drugs. The second approach is to stop using a particular drug and reintroduce it when resistance levels have fallen. This idea derives from the assumption that resistance mechanisms come with a fitness cost and that in the absence of selection, resistant strains will be out-competed by sensitive strains. The third strategy is to learn more about the resistance mechanisms themselves. This area of research is focused on degradative enzymes and efflux pumps. see http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/13/243
These people go nude, out in the middle of nowhere, bathing in a hole dug with water and a shovel. :)
They take a truck with a 55 gal barrel or some other tank of water out to nowhere, get naked and start digging and then get in and get totally soaked, even the face.
Has anyone done a study on these people?
Please include video with your study and include the wash off part, thanks
You should get a bit of dirt in your life.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that excessive cleanliness can contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases, like Crohns and asthma.
The theory being that your immune system has historically had a lot to do.... and when confronted by the microbial desert presented by modern living in a bleached-up house, gets a bit bored and starts vandalising the house.....
...welcome our new Superbug overlords!
:)
I, for one, Welcome them