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."

Comments

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[interkin3tic]

This is not idle unproven speculation. Scientists use phrases like "suggests" rather than "proves" only because they recognize their own data can be misleading. This is published in one of the most competitive journals, speculation doesn't cut it.

The article can be found paywalled here The abstract highlights that any uncertainty is in the related details, not whether or not it happened.

Clostridium difficile disease has recently increased to become a dominant nosocomial pathogen in North America and Europe, although little is known about what has driven this emergence. Here we show that two epidemic ribotypes (RT027 and RT078) have acquired unique mechanisms to metabolize low concentrations of the disaccharide trehalose. RT027 strains contain a single point mutation in the trehalose repressor that increases the sensitivity of this ribotype to trehalose by more than 500-fold. Furthermore, dietary trehalose increases the virulence of a RT027 strain in a mouse model of infection. RT078 strains acquired a cluster of four genes involved in trehalose metabolism, including a PTS permease that is both necessary and sufficient for growth on low concentrations of trehalose. We propose that the implementation of trehalose as a food additive into the human diet, shortly before the emergence of these two epidemic lineages, helped select for their emergence and contributed to hypervirulence.

I haven't read the paper and don't have a background in it. Reviewers do sometimes make mistakes obviously. But you'd be an idiot to say this is "just an unproven possibility." Leave spewing "meh, scientists, what do they know, just a theory" FUD to the sleazeballs hired by the relevant industry. If you have an actual critique of their methods, by all means, post it here and on pubmed commons or wherever else. Publish a response in nature even. But don't fucking parrot cigarette company lawyers, climate change deniers, and creationists, here on slashdot.