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Resistance To Antibiotics Found In Isolated Amazonian Tribe
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.
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.
More plausibly is that there's an array of antibiotic sources in their diet/cultural medicine that led them to develop a resistance.
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.
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
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.