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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.
On first contact they asked for faeces samples.
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."
More plausibly is that there's an array of antibiotic sources in their diet/cultural medicine that led them to develop a resistance.
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)
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.
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.
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
It is quite common for people in places without refrigerators to eat moldy food and the like.
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'
It's almost as if the microbes we get antibiotics from have been around for millions of years...
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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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
Indeed. Moldy foods and the like (lactic acid bacteria, yeasts) have been used as preservatives by humans for millennia. Things like:
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>
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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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
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.
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.