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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.