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A Popular Sugar Additive May Have Fueled the Spread of Two Superbugs (latimes.com)
Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,797) quotes the Los Angeles Times:
Two bacterial strains that have plagued hospitals around the country may have been at least partly fueled by a sugar additive in our food products, scientists say. Trehalose, a sugar that is added to a wide range of food products, could have allowed certain strains of Clostridium difficile to become far more virulent than they were before, a new study finds. The results, described in the journal Nature, highlight the unintended consequences of introducing otherwise harmless additives to the food supply.
Nearly half a million people were sickened by C. difficile in 2011, when it was directly linked to 15,000 deaths. "The misuse and overuse of antibiotics has long been thought to be responsible for the rise of many kinds of antibiotic-resistant 'superbug'," notes the article, before citing a researcher who now believes "the circumstantial and experimental evidence points to trehalose as an unexpected culprit."
Nearly half a million people were sickened by C. difficile in 2011, when it was directly linked to 15,000 deaths. "The misuse and overuse of antibiotics has long been thought to be responsible for the rise of many kinds of antibiotic-resistant 'superbug'," notes the article, before citing a researcher who now believes "the circumstantial and experimental evidence points to trehalose as an unexpected culprit."
I was pissed that I had to click on the stupid article link just to find out the name of the sugar, so there it is.
From Wikipedia:
Trehalose, also known as mycose or tremalose, is a natural alpha-linked disaccharide formed by an ,-1,1-glucoside bond between two -glucose units. In 1832, H.A.L. Wiggers discovered trehalose in an ergot of rye,[3] and in 1859 Marcellin Berthelot isolated it from trehala manna, a substance made by weevils, and named it trehalose.[4] It can be synthesised by bacteria,[5] fungi, plants, and invertebrate animals. It is implicated in anhydrobiosis—the ability of plants and animals to withstand prolonged periods of desiccation. It has high water retention capabilities, and is used in food and cosmetics.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
And shame on both the LA Times and /. for not ensuring that there was a link to the original article or at least a DOI.
I've never trusted artificial sweateners. Call it irrational if you want but they just seem like getting something for nothing and I don't trust that. In this case we just discovered Trehalose's hidden "price".
I have a close friend who has been diagnosed c.diff free for almost three months now. It took him years of discomfort and our last line drug for the disease (which apperently is new enough insurance companies arent covering it yet) to get to this point.
To improve my own diet I just ate less and less sweet stuff over time. After a while you don't crave it any more.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
It seems like this 'highlights' one unique and unproven possibility, and nothing more. Getting ahead of ourselves....
Actually, reading the paper over in Nature (sorry, paywall) and good science reporting from the kinds of places that'll link you straight to Nature? They're very clear that they've not gotten to do human trials--which is understandable, you're not going to get to do them without the paper, and even then you might have a severe amount of trouble getting permission to do them given that C. diff can be fatal.
What it highlights, really, is that the current methods used to determine if a food additive is harmless are stupid. Animal models are only good at telling us if it's safe for that species--in this specific case, some of the weaknesses the researchers behind the paper note is that we don't know if trehalose makes it far enough in the human intestine to reach where C. diff gets found. (It totally does in mice.) The models they used, however, were a lot closer to human than is usual for safety testing: the mice were modified and set up to have human-like gut flora, which is what was required to catch this problem. That said, given that the enzyme required to break down trehalose is not abundant even in those people who have it? It's likely that the mouse models are close enough.
Yes and no. What they propose is happening is that Cdiff, which something like 30% of the world's population carries in their GI, has become an infectious problem (Cdiff infection, or CDI) in the last 15 years because of the following process: First, a patient takes life saving antibiotics for a medical problem. Without antibiotics something like 60% of infections are fatal (the bad old days before penicillin was discovered). Those antibiotics wipe out the infection, but also the good GI bacteria, but Cdiff is able to make an impervious spore form that is immune to all known antibiotics except for Metronidazole and Vancomycin (which are both not normally given for infections, Vancomycin especially has some very nasty side effects). Once the patient is better and they discontinue antibiotics, the Cdiff can flourish in the absence of other bacteria. It produces some very nasty toxins, one that destroys cells as well as a systemic poison that can kill you (toxin A and B).
The new discovery is that it is not just the absence of healthy bacteria in the GI that triggers CDI, but the presence of this food additive Trehalose that was previously thought to be safe, because the body doesn't absorb it very well (though it does get absorbed): "Trehalose is nutritionally equivalent to glucose, because it is rapidly broken down into glucose by the enzyme trehalase, which is present in the brush border of the intestinal mucosa of omnivores (including humans) and herbivores." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The bottom line is now that we know that Trehalose is a aggravating risk factor for CDI, any foods that contain it should be required to carry a large warning label on the front of the package (like cigarettes) describing the danger, if it is not banned altogether as a food additive. At the same time, the companies that are profiting from the manufacture and sale of Trehalose are looking at a serious lawsuit, since about 50,000 people in the US alone have died from Cdiff in the last 10 years.
There will be no human trials, other than to ban Trehalose for patients during and for a month after treatment with antibiotics (typical incidence time frame for CDI). If the cases of Cdiff drop precipitously, especially in high risk patients, that will be all the confirmation required.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like