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."
Did you actually read the article? They talk at length about how the soil is, well, a giant germ-warfare zone. Bacteria are all attacking each other all the time. Two of the strains they pulled out of the soil were resistant to 15 of the 21 antibiotics with which they tested. They explicitly mention that many of the antibiotics are already synthesized by competing bacteria. They believed, though, that it was very unlikely that any bacterium would ever have been exposed to all the drugs they were resistant to. The researchers believe the germs are using existing defense mechanisms to apply to new (to them) antibiotics.
Your assertion that 'because no superbug yet exists, none ever will' is just, well, stupid. That's like saying that nothing ever changes... yet, somehow, we have people now, and we didn't forty or fifty million years ago.
The modern world is unique, from an evolutionary standpoint, so none of the existing bacteria will have evolved to deal properly with it. They're working on that. A superbug is only a matter of time.
MRSA is a pretty damn good first iteration.