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Multidrug Resistance Gene Released By Chinese Wastewater Treatment Plants
MTorrice writes "In recent years, increasing numbers of patients worldwide have contracted severe bacterial infections that are untreatable by most available antibiotics. Some of the gravest of these infections are caused by bacteria carrying genes that confer resistance to a broad class of antibiotics called beta-lactams, many of which are treatments of last resort. Now a research team reports that some wastewater treatment plants in China discharge one of these potent resistance genes into the environment. Environmental and public health experts worry that this discharge could promote the spread of resistance."
Antibacterial soaps are a frankenstein. Invented as something to cure a sppoky "risk" (like "bacteria") and sold, sold, sold. Multivitamins, ADHD drugs, billions of dollars of bullshit are being sold to consumers, harnessing innate risk aversion and evolved nurture to sell snake oil. India has already used so many antibacterial products that its hospitals are a paradise for resistant staph bacteria. Go upstream from the Chinese water treatment plants, and you'll find consumers who think they are doing the right thing and protecting their families.
Gently reply
So, I have seen my gf, parents and even myself being given by doctors high spectrum antibiotics for trivial sickness; then the disgrace of the cattle and farming industry using preemptively antibiotics just in case, for being able to maintain animals in unthinkable environments and for fattening animal and not stopping at anything, even when it is already widespread knowledge antibiotics will stop working in less than ten years time. And know it is Chinas fault???? Talking about the elephant in the room...
I'd say it is a pretty good chance, actually.
Your basic argument is that because it is a "possible" outcome, and not "divine omniprescient 100% certainty that it will in fact happen", that it can be safely ignored.
Let's examine how that is utterly retarded as a proposition, shall we?
I can strike a match inside a room filled with natural gas. It may or may not explode, depending on how much oxygen is also present. Since it isn't "100% straight up always going to happen", does that mean it is a good idea to strike matches around natural gas?
What's that?
No?
--I didn't think so.
The same is true with microbes and horizontal gene transfer. The germs are the room filled with natural gas, the genes being dumped are the match, and china is the idiot trying to strike it.
If they keep at it, it's gonna blow up. That's how the numbers stack up in such things. We have microbial colonies forming these resistant genomes in such tiny envirnments as hospitals, ad whole new species of extremophiles evolving from conditions imposed in places like the JPL laboratories. Here we have industrial scale contamination, over wide areas of planet, with literally uncountable species of potentially harmful microbes being given opportunities to obtain those genes from horizontal transfer.
Seriously. Pull the blindfold off.
oh well..
so we all die horrible deaths..
New Law Needed!!
If the Doctor doesn't wash his hands every time he visits you for treatment, then the Doctor must complete the treatment and cannot charge you for it.
This would cure MRSA REALLY quick!!
Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy. I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
Life is not for the lazy.
Maybe my knowledge of biology is a bit lacking, but doesn't a gene need an organism? It sounds like they are talking about drug resistant bacteria, which have a traits of their DNA.
It's just as annoy as cop shows where look for DNA samples. You're not sampling the DNA with your cotton swab, you're attempting to capture cells, from which you can extract the DNA.
Then again, we're talking about two of the same groups (news media and fictional cop shows) where they'd both easily say "hack the mainframe". Ahh, the mainframe. The mysterious device I can access from a Nintendo Gameboy in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, using more more than my good looks, the Gameboy, a clothes pin, and some chewing gum.
Ya, tell me about those evil genes floating around by themselves, in their attempt to take over the world.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
No I am not joking. Given China's history are abusing and murdering it's own citizens, this is a likely suspect. If this is true, it is not only insane. it should be criminal. I may be wrong, if so, someone tell me why they would release this in a nations water supply for any other reason. It is sad we say we live in a age of military/social insanity where atrocities are committed against people in the name of whatever is convenient at the time to blame. It is a shame such a small group of people are so capable of harming so many people. But group mentality has always been that way. A few people can terrorize a large crowd. sigh...........
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
I have cold n cough... So do 5 of my friends.. Whom should I blame?
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means. (Resistance is so common that if you're prescribed a beta lactam antibiotic nowadays, it'll probably be compounded with a beta lactamase inhibitor) Since beta lactam resistance is so common, the gene will no doubt be common in the waste stream, not just in China but everywhere.
like how a white man would say.
Now there is money to be made in multi-drug resistant jeans!
They deserve a LOT more than they are getting. That's the real crime here.
not futile?
What could possibly go wrong!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
same as before.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Or gay people or Mexicans or atheists...
As long as you don't finger the actual cause: agricultural antibiotics abuse.
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means.
It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.
Plasmid transfer.
I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..
We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.
At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The only way to fight evolution is to stay one step ahead, it's only natural for resistance to happen. There will always be the next bad thing, but with good ol fashioned human ingenuity we can fight.
Well we could also regress and start doing it like we did in the dark ages with the catch 22 drowning test.
I actually thought the same thing - quantify it in real, solid terms, or don't bother mentioning it. Using 'fluffy' English isn't much use to anyone, imo. I haven't bothered to read if they actually do quantify things, but there you go.
Max.
says the Monsanto PR rep.
It's nice to see that China is finally releasing dissidents.
www.gaiageek.com
Just because they found it 1 place that they looked, doesn't mean its not NOT in other places too.
Uneducated consumers + modern denial of causality + business interests = fail. You have ignorant parents who buy antibacterial everything because its "for the children" and because after all, they need to protect theirs, and it probably wont turn into MRSA _for them_, so shouldn't they do everything they can,etc. etc. Ditto with food - people buying shit at Walmart because they need to save money, meanwhile their neighbors lose their jobs and their kids end up playing with cadmium laced toys, but hey, they need to save 3 dollars on that gizmo.... Add the business interests capitalizing on this ignorance and philosophical gap (A !is !A) and you end up with the shitstorm we're in.
Moral: know what you're buying, know why you're buying it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
the rampant misuse of antibiotics in the USA is far worse. Just ask any hospital's chief pathologist. They will most likely (every micro lab I have worked in did it) tracked the increase in resistance found naturally thanks to us giving everyone with a snotty nose antibiotics.
What's actually going on here is that Chinese researchers have carried out this research using the most easily available data they have - Chinese data. There's no reason to believe that US wastewater treatment plants don't also release this material, because AFAIK, no one has checked.
-1 complaining about moderation
Seriously? That's like saying we've made HIV able to transmit to anything and survive via water and there's a TEENY TEENY chance it will infect the world's population of wildlife in less than a week.
Someone should be isolating bacteriaphages from this source and testing them on MRSA and similar resistant bacteria.
More info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
Not me.
If they ever come up with non-fart milk, I'm boycotting.
Definitely a Borg joke in there somewhere.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
always refuse'ed to eat at chinky retraunts because she said they were dirty. We always thoght shewas just rbean acsist. Nope.
CHINKS ARE DIRTY BASTIRD"S
Like Lord Kelvin saying (giving the full quotation from wikiquote):
Of course Kelvin also calculated the age of the earth as being between 20 million and 400 million years. So quantification can often lead to wildly incorrect conclusions.