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."

Comments

Antibacterial soap Frankenstein

[retroworks]

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.

Re:Antibacterial soap Frankenstein

[ShanghaiBill]

Antibacterial soaps are a frankenstein. Invented as something to cure a sppoky "risk" (like "bacteria") and sold, sold, sold.

Good news: The FDA is planning to restrict antibacterial additives.

antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[ruir]

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...

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

In all 3 circumstances, the same root cause is responsible: Big Industry.

1) the medical profession has thousands of careers and work opportunities on the line, influenced by the mere appearance of being negligent. As a consequence, doctors routinely perscribe preventative antibiotics, as insurance not against disease, but against accusations of being negligent at healthcare providers.

2) the meat and dairy industry is suffering from the unsavory effects that big name oligopolies introduce when they battle it out for low low prices. It costs considerably less per unit of product produced to shove 500 cattle into a pen barely big enough for 100, by essetially crating them in tiny stalls where they stand knee deep in their own shit 24/7, in front of a trough filled with corn, than it does to raise them on an open pasture. As such, marica's loe of eating beef every day of every week makes NOT using antibiotics an insensible proposition; instead of drug resistant bacteria, there would be high meat prices and meat shortages as demand far outstripped supplies. There's a LOT of cashflow at stake there.

3) china is trying to enter into a market space where it has to compete with the shit caused by the big names in western marets, and as such, has to be competative against even the sickening shit going on listed above: the only way to do that? Do it themseves, more radically, with no oversights or controls, and offer the products even cheaper.

The root problem in all cases?

Money, and the inherent failing in EVERY economic model ever tendered by greedy idiots: the belief that "externalities" don't matter, and that purpetual growth in production is always possible no matter what, and that no matter how fucked up the consequences make things, "science" and "technology" will "always make it OK."

Chew on that for awhile.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron.

Do you have any idea what the externalities on your lifestyle actually are?

Here's a hint: research what monoculturing crops does to biodiversity, and the longterm impact that has on an ecosystem.
You might just find that your "enlightened" lifestyle choice isn't so enlightened afterall.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way it will be resolved is for humanity to accept metastability with the environment it lives in, and humanity has spent many hundreds of thousands of years evolving in a way that depends on doing the exact opposite of that.

Even with the handwriting burned into the goddamn wall, we as a species will still rush facefirst into the pits of that hell, and complain and lament about how good things used to be, all while murdering each other over what's left.

It's what we always do as a species. Not once, ever, in human hystory has humanity ever averted the resource depletion disaster through self regulation.

Never.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[blue trane]

When the white man got to North America, they found the environment as full of resources as the Indians had found it when they got there over 10,000 years before.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

Native americans DID NOT live in metastability. Their civilizations rose and fell so quickly they barely left the stone age.

Check out what happened to the ancient puebloans for instance.

They abandoned their mighty cities, because they overextended their use of ground water.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet your argument, that the white colonists encountered an environment just as rich as when the native americans arrived at the end of the preceeding iceage thousands of years before, is patently false.

At last 3 species of megafauna have been recorded going extinct "rapidly" after this initial human expansion.

That alone invalidates your argument.

Then of course, you have the historicaly recorded incdeces in south america involving the incla, maya, toltec, and olmec peoples. You know, where they caused agricultural collapse through unsustainable agricultural practices, and even with rampant warfare cutting their populations to ribbons, they still didn't really escape the resource depletion crisis.

Sure, there are remnants of those cultures, but they are barely just that, with almost nothing in common with the civilizations they came from. The genelines might have survived, but the civilizations did not.

The native american civilizations were not magical hippies.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[flaming error]

I think the word "civilization" implies a dense population; sparse populations don't require complex societies.. Would you agree with that?

Any time an area is densely populated, the population will consume local resources faster than nature can replenish them, and they will rely on trade and transportation systems to sustain the population, and complex laws to maintain order.

Even outside of densely populated areas, humans like any other species will reproduce until the point their population can not be sustained by their habitat, and individuals will die as equilibrium is restored.

But none of those facts disprove the notion that some aboriginal cultures evolved philosophies, morals and superstitions that encouraged them to live as a part of their environment rather than attempting to place themselves beyond the reach of nature.

Whether because nature imposed it or because cultures accepted it, the aboriginal population numbers were relatively stable over millenia, and their activity over time had little environmental impact compared to the european immigrants'.

Native cultures were far more sustainable than ours. GP's points are valid.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

That I am willing to accept; the fallacy that "native americans" (generic category) had that property is what I dispute. I can point out examples of clearly destructive and non-sustainable behaviors from native american cultures all day long. The difference between the native americans and the europeans was a technological gap more than anything. The europeans had better tools to exploit the environment, and naturally exploited it harder and faster.

Humanity's evolutionary path has been a long littany of advances in how to modify the environment to better suit themselves. Tools, agriculture, medicine, culture-- they all converge on the unified objective.

As far as I am aware, at no point has humanity realized that this is unsustainable, and chosen to adapt themselves to suit the environmet, instead of the inverse. Some shamanistic tribes might possibly have done this to a limited extent; but it still isn't a knowing, willful choice to abstain; it is a superstitious practice, reinforced by natural forces that are outside the groups control.

It is this latter that is what is important here.

When presented with the knowledge, opportunity, and power to affect such change to avert the disaster, no no major civilization has been able or willing to make that choice.

Even the example given by the GP about the puebloans moving to avoid local scarcity illustrates this point. They constructed reservoirs to collect rainwater, and other such projects, yes-- but that just shows that they understood that water was a finite resource, and that demand for it cannot be continually extended; instead of altering their culture to limit their growth, they continued to grow, until even with migrational patterns, their civilization could no longer be sustained.

Our own culture is on the fast track to the same kind of sudden drop at the bottom. The signs of the underlying reality are all around us, but as a collective whole, we willfully choose to believe fictions and actively lie to ourselves that we are more clever than the laws of physics, rather than see those realities, say "Oh my fucking god!", and actively choose to diminish our activities until they are metastable with the environment, and stay there.

Re:antibiotic used "preventively" in cattle

[Anonymous Coward]

That assertion makes a number of unsupported assumptions, most important of which is that the meat will be lot raised, fed on corn.

Only then does that line of reasoning add up, since that would require monocultured corn to sustain the monocultured cattle, making the cattle "monoculture squared!".

The reality is that not all beef is lot raised, nor is all beef corn fed. I know. My aunt raises cattle. She does neither. I buy my beef from her. It costs me about 300$ a year up front for half a cow. Grassfed only cattle have denser muscle tissue, making it tougher than most consumers want. It does however also reduce the fat content, making the steaks less "marbled", reducing the "fatty flavor" most beef consumers are looking for. However, if you are looking for a high protien foodsource that is healthier than the mainstream market alternatives, (for both of the above reasons) and with a considerably smaller externality footprint, buying grassfed only has a number of real advantages. Raising the cattle at a proper density on the pasture actually sustains the grassland ecosystem. See below.

A typical hay pasture in an area that before human activity happened to be an open grassland, sustains a fabulously wider range of biodiversity than that pasture land would sustaining a monoculture of soybeans. (In my aunt's cattle pasture, I have personally observed spittle bugs, prairie dogs, aphids, grasshoppers, cattle egrets, a wide variety of small rodents, hundreds of species of terrestrial plant, includng various dicot species in addition to the peferred monocot grasses, many species of wild fowl and songbirds, etc. In the typical soybean field, I observe only soybeans.) The cattle replace the natural large herbivores that had adapted to that environment, namely the plains bison. They keep the grass healthy by providing mechanical stimulation of plant growth, facilitate the hunting behavior of the plains cattle egret, break the sod layer so that prairie dogs and small field mice and voles can establish tunnels, and spread plant seeds with their feces. Keeping their numbers sustainable through selective harvesting and husbandry provides not only food for humans, but sustains a very valuable habitat for a radical diversity of species.

The ethical and enlightened choice, then, is not "vegan" or "vegetarian", but based on the whole food production chain involved in your particular region. I would accept a subculture that espouses "permaculture only" diets (whichwould espouse maximum sustainability and diversity in the growing environment), but not one that bases itself on faulted preconditions, like the one you just made, or on faulted ethical concerns such as "eating animals is mean".

I eat beef, and have no issues doing so, as I know full well where the actual cow I eat came from, and what conditions it was raised under. I know it was terminated under humane circumstances, and was raised in a healthy natural environment. To me, eating the beef is more ethical than eating soy only.

Re:some/could/etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I've FIGURED OUT HOW TO STOP MRSA!!

[MarkvW]

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!!

Re:I've FIGURED OUT HOW TO STOP MRSA!!

[tjb6]

No it wouldn't. Patient to patient transfer via a 3rd party (doctor/nurse/visitor/whatever) is part of the problem, but there are plenty of people arriving at hospital with these things in progress already.

Correct use of antibiotics, and banning misuse of antibiotics (eg, as an animal feed supplement) would attack the root of the problem.

Regular low-dose antibiotics for livestock causes the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the gut. Since bacteria have the unfortunate talent of being able to pass on some of their genetic material to their neighbours, the resistance is then passed on to their less pleasant neighbours, who are happy to take the party to us in a big way.

Blaming the doctors for all of this is like blaming your doctor for obesity - they could have done something better, but bad things had to be happening already.

Re:I've FIGURED OUT HOW TO STOP MRSA!!

[mysidia]

Regular low-dose antibiotics for livestock causes the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the gut.

This is problematic. If the antibiotic is prescription for humans, then access should not be allowed to use it for non-medical non-veterinary purposes.

If there are life/limb-threatening diseases that the antibiotic is on a short list of treatments for; it should be prescription only.

Bacteria share genes

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:Gene discharged??

[Firethorn]

Basically what the AC said. Bacteria don't have sexes, but they still swap genes via various ways, and are actually able to incorporate genes found in the environment. Lateral gene transfer is one of those 'oh wow' things when you get into what was at least in my time, college level biology.

Ever play bioshock and remember how you'd get powers via drinking or shooting yourself up with something? That's sort of what bacteria do in real life. The bacteria 'consumes' the genetic material and incorporates it in with it's own.

Summary is garbage

[russotto]

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.

Carbapenems *are* last resort drugs.

[Valdrax]

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.

Progress

[gaiageek]

It's nice to see that China is finally releasing dissidents.

Probably happens everywhere

[Gothmolly]

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.