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