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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.
Works for me...
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> 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.
We've been putting antibiotics in animal feed for a long time now. Probably the environment is "polluted" with it just like with pesticides, mercury, etc.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a critical comment and should be modded up. I was about to make the same comment (so hence I may be biased for my praise of your comment).
http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/629_1.html
Waksman was studying soil bacteria when he discovered streptomycin. Numerous other antibiotics were identified from similiar bacteria, so it is not surprising, as you mention, that many forms of bacteria are resistent to antibiotics, since either the soil was the original source for the antibiotic, or the mechanism of action for the antibiotic for which future chemical compounds were screened. For these reasons, I don't see what all the concerns are. Sounds like just uninformed fear-mongering.
... 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
As far as actual tablets, etc., go...antibiotics are usually prescribed to be taken until there are no more tablets. If you do have any meds you want to get rid of, please take them to a pharmacy - they should put it in their drug disposal bucket for no charge.
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.
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.
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.