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Resistance To Antibiotics Found In Isolated Amazonian Tribe

Posted by timothy on from the strong-willed-organisms dept.

sciencehabit writes When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami's gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array of antibiotic-resistance genes, according to a new study, even though these mountain people had never ingested antibiotics or animals raised with drugs. The find suggests that microbes have long evolved the capability to fight toxins, including antibiotics, and that preventing drug resistance may be harder than scientists thought.

53 comments

  1. It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To the hills! NOW!

    1. Re: It Has Begun! by tysonedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or, as a more plausible answer, said microbes are capable of being transplanted quite easily, such as by winds, rains, migratory birds, and the like. That's not even mentioning contaminants that simply enter the water table from neighboring civilizations and are drank unknowingly by this people or their sources of food.

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    2. Re: It Has Begun! by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More plausibly is that there's an array of antibiotic sources in their diet/cultural medicine that led them to develop a resistance.

    3. Re: It Has Begun! by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would expect that to be the case

      I would even go further out on the limb and suggest that antibiotic resistant bacteria have always been present

      It is imply the presence of antibiotic substances that weed out the rest of the bacteria, leaving the resistant ones as the 'last man standing' so that we notice them

      It is not so much the case that our use of antibiotics have caused antibiotic resistant strains to 'develop', we have simply eliminated the rest and exposed the resistant ones

      --
      Wherever You Go, There You Are
    4. Re: It Has Begun! by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      It is quite common for people in places without refrigerators to eat moldy food and the like.

    5. Re: It Has Begun! by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are some scientists who think that the idea of microbes "developing" resistance is wrong anyway. All our antibiotics are naturally occurring, and a mouthful of soil contains dozens of different antibiotics. The alternative theory is that all we've done is change the balance of antibiotics in the environment, leading to an unnatural selection of antibiotic-resistant strains. The abundance of life in the rainforest extends to antibiotic-producing fungi, so the microfauna will naturally have been exposed to a broad variety of antibiotics, and therefore natural selection will have led to resistant strains.

      --
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    6. Re: It Has Begun! by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Four comments in, and this discussion is effectively over.

      Yes, random mutations happen randomly. Sometimes they happen in hospitals using antibiotics, but usually they happen anywhere else. Sometimes, those mutations happen to survive long enough to become widespread through a population. Sometimes that population is isolated, and the mutation becomes common. Sometimes a particular antibiotic (natural or synthesized) affects the balance of variants in the population.

      Very rarely, we humans have suitable circumstances to actually notice.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    7. Re: It Has Begun! by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 1

      I think that it is debatable whether the widespread use of antibiotics have exposed an existing population of antibiotic resistant bacteria, or if there have been recent mutations that have allowed bacteria to survive antibiotics

      This paper discusses bot the existence of antibiotic resistance strains of bacteria, and the non-mutative processes that are involved in transferring resistant r-genes between different types of bacteria
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

      --
      Wherever You Go, There You Are
    8. Re: It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Life adapts. Life has adapted to oxygen gas, and it could possibly adapt to elemental fluorine gas atmospheres, given sufficient time and effort. Antibiotics are a piece of cake in comparison, and only a temporary measure, or more like, security through obscurity measure, unless it's a monoculture issue that everyone is using the same antibiotics, there is no good incentive to adapt to one. The jungle is full of security through obscurity antibiotics, and genetic diversity in them, and none is worth it mutating and fully adapting to when there is easier food to get somewhere else. That's what most basic security measures are about, like a lock on your door on a house made of wood, it deters enough, but if someone wanted to get inside they could use a pickax on your wooden walls, or blast them with a dynamite, or just whatever swat teams use. That's the basic principle of good antibiotics, security through obscurity, genetic variability and no monoculture in your defenses, in the long run. Long live the jungle and the variety it represents.

      ~sillybilly(out of posts, posting as AC)

    9. Re: It Has Begun! by tomhath · · Score: 1

      A far more plausible answer is what the researchers concluded: microbes are in a constant battle with each other, one develops a toxin to kill a second, the second develops resistance to that toxin.

      The genes they found are naturally occurring and are the same genes bacteria use to develop resistance to the antibiotics we use. It would have been far more surprising if the bacteria didn't carry those genes.

    10. Re: It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is not so much the case that our use of antibiotics have caused antibiotic resistant strains to 'develop', we have simply eliminated the rest and exposed the resistant ones

      If non-resistant strains were not eliminated, they would compete with the resistant strains for resources and keep them in check.

    11. Re: It Has Begun! by jblues · · Score: 1

      Indeed. Moldy foods and the like (lactic acid bacteria, yeasts) have been used as preservatives by humans for millennia. Things like:

      • * Lactic acid bacteria for preserving winter stock of vegetables. (sauerkraut, kimchi, etc). This process actually results in food that is more nutritious than the raw vegetable. Not only does it preserve the vitamin C that would've been destroyed during cooking, but creates several antioxidants that are important for healthy. (We oxygen breathing humans are prone to rust). Different strains of the same bacterias are also used preserving dairy food into yogurt, and again the resultant stuff is considered to be more nutritious than the original raw product. In modern times we do start with pasteurized dairy, which has no vitamin C, but is safer, especially when high density farming is practiced.
      • * Yeasts : Bread, beer, etc.
      • * Mold : Delicious stinky blue cheeses.

      • Of course if you don't have a fridge and you eat random moldy food, as opposed to food that has undergone a culturing process then all bets are off. Chances are it will be relatively harmless, it might do some good. Then there's certain molds and bacterias (eg botulism) that produce lethal toxins.

      --
      If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
    12. Re: It Has Begun! by davester666 · · Score: 1

      Actually, you need to run from these people, because they only have these microbes because they have been messing with some nasty viruses.

      --
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    13. Re: It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can remember a time when it appeared to be a sacred Rite of Passage for biologists to go to the Amazonian rain forest to dig up samples to bring back for analysis as antibiotics. Quite a few miracle antibiotics were derived from this process and may still be today, for all I know.

      With that as a basis I'd expect whatever diseases were present in the area were thoroughly resistant to many of our antibiotics. They had to be to continue to exist as diseases.

      {^_^}

    14. Re: It Has Begun! by Firethorn · · Score: 1

      I remembered something about them digging up gut bacteria from something like 200 years ago in England - well before human use of antibiotics, and found that the gut bacteria in the corpses they exhumed were resistant to more antibiotics than modern versions.

      But in looking for it, I found a study that they've found antibiotic resistances from 30,000 year old DNA from permafrost.

      Which kind of makes sense. How did we develop penicillin? From Fungi. Which has been around for quite a while itself. Where did we develop many of our other antibiotics? By observing nature.

      --
      I don't read AC A human right
    15. Re: It Has Begun! by HiThere · · Score: 1

      You left out 1 1/2 considerations:
      1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).

      another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environmental stresses. So when one strain of bacteria develops a capability, it is likely to soon get widely shared with other quite different strains.

      So, yeah, keeping resistant bacteria from appearing is going to depend on developing antibacterial mechanisms that there isn't a long history of pre-adaptive mechanism development. And since some of the adaptive mechanisms are pretty generic (like pumping out a wide variety of chemicals that you don't expect to have in your body [think kidneys]) this is likely to be quite difficult.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    16. Re: It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gary I completely agree. There is nonproof for evolution itself you could actually say. Mutations are losing DNA not gaining it. Do your research.

    17. Re: It Has Begun! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, but you're wrong. Mutations are changes, which can be gain, loss, or neutral, both in terms of function and in terms of amount of DNA present.

  2. Awkward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    On first contact they asked for faeces samples.

    1. Re: Awkward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Hi we are from a far more advanced civilisation, would you mind pooping into this jar?

    2. Re: Awkward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First, those come that let you shit on them,
      Then, those come that shit on you. Regardless whether you like it or not.

    3. Re:Awkward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gives more credence to backside probing...

    4. Re: Awkward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you sure that they think that outsiders are more advanced? You sound like someone that hasn't lived in other cultures much.

    5. Re: Awkward by dreamchaser · · Score: 2

      What do you think the anal probes are for that the Greys use when they abduct us?

  3. Natural penicillin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I assume that they considered the possibility that this tribe may have been exposed to naturally-occurring antibiotics? Even if they weren't aware of the medicinal value, they may have been ingesting them in their diet, or as part of an herbal remedy.

  4. That's what happens when you take the easy way by koan · · Score: 1

    I imagine industrialized societies are getting weaker as well.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
  5. Ima gonna haveta disagree.. by the_skywise · · Score: 1

    I think it's more likely that the antibiotic resistance microbes found their way in from the ecosystem polluted by the even distant civilization rather than "developed" spontaneously on their own (though that's obviously possible)

    If we're to believe that climate change is a worldwide phenomenon caused by concentrated/isolated pollution sources it's not that farfetched to believe there's a similar mechanism for antibiotic resistant bacteria developed in a "civilized" area to find its way to uncivilized areas (animals, insects, water sources, etc)

    1. Re:Ima gonna haveta disagree.. by itzly · · Score: 4, Informative

      It should be possible to figure out which it is by comparing the genome of the resistant bacteria, and see if they have common genes for the resistance.

      But I don't see why it would be so difficult for the local bacteria to develop resistance. Many antibiotics are based on stuff we find in nature, and the amazonian tribe probably uses natural substances to fight diseases. Resistance would be a logical result of that.

    2. Re:Ima gonna haveta disagree.. by Snarky+McButtface · · Score: 1

      Antibiotic resistant microbes predate modern human usage of antibiotics.

  6. "Prevent"? by Ignacio · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do people believe that preventing drug resistance is still possible? You can only switch to a drug they aren't resistant to yet, or to whose resistance they have lost.

    1. Re:"Prevent"? by itzly · · Score: 2

      You can slow down the rate at which bacteria become resistant.

    2. Re:"Prevent"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If we quit indiscriminately immersing our world in antibiotics, we won't be so strongly selecting for these resistances.

    3. Re:"Prevent"? by Brett+Buck · · Score: 1

      Right. Just let people die of curable disases to avoid antibiotic resistance.

    4. Re:"Prevent"? by Livius · · Score: 1

      Find a dictionary and look up 'indiscriminately'.

    5. Re:"Prevent"? by itzly · · Score: 1

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

    6. Re:"Prevent"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A while back I had a nasty and persistent case of diarrhea. I went to the doctor but the doctor refused to give me antibiotics. It wasn't until a few months later when I went to a different doctor for a lung infection and was finally prescribed antibiotics that my diarrhea finally cleared up.

      Now, I wouldn't disagree that there are certain cases where antibiotics are overused. But I also see the opposite: cases where someone most likely has a bacterial infection that the doctors refuse to cure. So these people going around infecting others - who eventually need antibiotics themselves. In the end, there is more antibiotic use - and more bacteria to develop/acquire resistance then if the bacterial infection had simply been cured in the first place.

      TLDR; knowing whether antibiotic resistance is "indiscriminate" isn't as easy as you might imagine.

    7. Re:"Prevent"? by MatthiasF · · Score: 1

      No, you can't. People assert this constantly by stating evolutionary pressure propagates drug resistant bacteria but that is by far not the leading cause.

      Bacteria are more like a city of people and less like a field of crops. When a new type of bacteria joins a location, it tries to talk to all of the bacteria around it (even outside it's species) using chemical triggers or even electrical pulses. When one type of bacteria is having troubles, either by not getting what it needs to survive or being attacked by anti-biotic or virus, they send out stress signals. Sometimes other bacteria in the area receive these signals and start taking action even though they do not need to do anything. This in turn leads to chaos, either from bacteria starting to produce a barrage of chemical defenses (setting off more defenses of other bacteria), trying to split to create new cells, throwing all their resources into unnecessary processes, etc., that starts to severely limit resources at the location for all of the bacteria.

      During this chaos, the rate of mutation is likely to drastically increase, characteristics between bacteria are more likely to be shared and bacteria will try to create defenses to random items it finds during the period. This means that bacteria not directly affected by the anti-biotic can develop the RNA or DNA to combat or avoid the anti-biotic, and then share it with those who are affected.

      And this also means that the primary culprit of the spread of drug-resistant bacteria is not the actual use of anti-biotic, but the sheer fact that bacteria is being shared between people.

  7. Not completely new: by Hartree · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is more confirmation, but it has already been known in the microbiology community for some time.

    Many of the genes that contribute to antibiotic resistance are far older than human use of antibiotics.

    How can that be? A couple ways. Mom Nature has been playing the antibiotic game for a very long time. Most of our antibiotics come from antibiotic producing organisms in nature (penicillin for example). The countermeasures have long been out there, but only in a small percentage of the bacteria out there, since there is a small cost to maintaining any given gene. When there is a big exposure to a particular antibiotic, the resistance genes spread through the bacterial community and become common, as we often see nowadays.

    The other source is that an enzyme that is used for some other purpose may well have some ability to protect against an antibiotic. An example would be a transporter molecule for some substance other than the antibiotic to be pumped out of the cell that is close enough to sometimes pump out the antibiotic. There would then be strong pressure for the bacteria to make more of that transporter protein when the antibiotic is around. Nature is good at using something it already has for a new purpose.

    That's one of the reasons antibiotic resistance is such a problem. Mother Nature has been playing this game a very long time and frankly is better at it than we are.

  8. Amazing! by penguinoid · · Score: 1

    It's almost as if the microbes we get antibiotics from have been around for millions of years...

    --
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  9. How isolated? by HBI · · Score: 1

    I seem to remember a National Geographic issue circa 1980 that was featuring Yanomami.

    The last actually isolated tribe that I am aware of was in the New Guinea highlands back in the 30s. The rest have had more or less direct contact with civilization. Do you really think they were never visited by a missionary? Have you ever met one of those people?

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    1. Re:How isolated? by PPH · · Score: 1

      I recall an article a few years back about one of those Amazonian tribes that wanted nothing to do with western civilization. There was a photo of a couple of tribesmen wearing New York Knicks tee shirts and a few Tupperware containers visible near the cooking fire.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    2. Re:How isolated? by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

      Do you really think they were never visited by a missionary?

      Missionary? More likely "Missionary Style"! What is the first thing that they do, when an advanced culture meets a primitive culture? They mutually exchange sexually transmitted diseases!

      Who knows? Maybe the villagers were visited by some folks, who didn't want to tell the government where they were, and what they were up to? Like, drug dealers, illegal good miners or illegal loggers?

      Or how about contamination that occurred during the testing? People working with Ebola patients were supposed to how to isolate themselves from getting infected. And gee, looked what happened?

      --
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    3. Re:How isolated? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      2009 is absurd. I recall studying the Yanomami in sociology at university. In 1970. They've been known for a long time.

    4. Re:How isolated? by HBI · · Score: 1

      It's easier to get laid on CL than in the Amazonian jungle...the missionaries have a good reason to go out there.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  10. Silly question by CODiNE · · Score: 2

    I'm assuming these people, isolated though they were, did not drink water or feed from animals exposed to water tainted with anti-biotic runoff?

    You could grow up on an undiscovered island and still have ingested plastics. The smoke doesn't always stay on its side of the restaurant.

    --
    Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
    1. Re:Silly question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First, they're not really isolated if we know about them, are they?

      Second, yes they have been exposed to Western medicine and drugs -- if they ate the first missionaries who "discovered" them.

    2. Re:Silly question by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Missionaries taste like chicken.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  11. Or maybe by Livius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Their environment has some awesome naturally-occurring antibiotic that the local bacteria have had to develop resistance to, and we might want to learn more about that.

    1. Re:Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course. Naturally-occurring antibiotics are everywhere: they are produced by bacteria. Most of our antibiotics are either bacterial products or semi-synthetic derivatives of them. Bacteria are in a constant state of chemical warfare with each other, through the productions of antibiotic substances. Of course this also involves developing resistance to the antibiotics a competing species is producing. Nothing surprising here.

  12. No shit, of course they have by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bacteria have been using chemical weapons against other bacteria for millions of years, they will be evolving new weapons and new means of resisting them for the foreseeable future.

  13. They are dressed up... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just look at the article's picture, they are wearing soft, clean and coloured fabric.... Not that isolated though.

  14. even worse by slashmydots · · Score: 1

    Studies (well okay, movies) have proven that bacteria from other planets and other outer space sources are even worse than remotely evolved ones on Earth.