Slashdot Mirror
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.
Works for me...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
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?
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.
It's the next step in military escalation: clods of dirt!
The first thing that I thought was "pandemic". Oh, Jesus Christ on a toothpick, do I want to see a pandemic that wipes out most, if not all of the human race, in my lifetime. I'm betting on bacteria to take out people. My GF is betting on a virus. I'd be happy with either one. Wouldn't it be ironic if humans are wiped out by something as simple as a really common bacteria that just developed resistance? I would most definitely laugh my ass off before bleeding out my eyes and dying.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
No need to worry, they wont be able to get their hands on it. Im pretty sure the Patriot Act means as soon as the FBI reads the article these terrorist bacteria and the soil harboring them will be detained indefinitely.
Paul
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
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 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 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.
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?
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)
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.
Offtopic.
LOL and the "Another diet change" gets +5 Funny.
ya ok.
At least I have the word bacteria in my post.
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.
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
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