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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.
What they've found is that certain strains of C.diff can convert trehalose into glucose; so the bacteria are using the sugar that's available to them. The important thing to keep in mind is that millions of people consume trehalose every day. It takes more than a bit of this sugar in one's food to cause the problem.
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.
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.
You may want to consider using that wording very carefully. The number of cancer cases per capita in the west has literally grown ten-fold during the 1900's, with the increased usage of chemical additives we considered "harmless".
All current evidence supports the view that cancer is literally the result of sufficient accumulation of mutations & low immune function--there is no 'magic' way to avoid it, it's not proof of sinful indulgence in scary chemicals like dihydrogen monoxide or anything. You just did not die before your body stopped being able to kill off cancerous cells fast enough.
Since the 1900s, life expectancy has steadily increased due to the discovery of such things as 'antibiotics' and other means to keep people from dying. Most of modern pharmacology doesn't date back to before the 1900s, damn few things date to before the 1850s or so, and a lot of the stuff used circa 1900 for medicine that isn't still in use was dropped from the pharmacopeia. (The only ways to pull off that feat is having truly horrible side effects and/or being proven to be snake oil. Only the second is 100% certain to result in removal.)
From the perspective of somebody who actually studied physiology+biochemistry and then wandered into neuroscience?
Absolutely nothing is wrong with salt, except most people don't consume anywhere near sufficient potassium. Sodium and potassium really, really need to be kept in balance--they're key to neurons' ability to generate action potentials and electrical signalling. (One interesting test on how to treat high sodium levels actually tried potassium supplementation instead of cutting salt intake to great success--it doesn't hurt that most Americans have a potassium deficiency. If you don't use the salt shaker and supplement potassium, then you should be fine and if you're not then you need to see a doctor & then a licensed dietician.)
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
I saw a horrifying experiment where they had bacteria on agar blocks. The first one had no antibiotic, the next one had 1x, the one after that 10x , 100x, 1000x, and so on.
So the bacteria spread all through the antibiotic free block. Then some mutant strain appears which is able to colonise the one with 1x antibiotic concentration. After a while another mutant strain appears and that colonises the one with 10x antibiotic concentration. Given enough time, the bacteria eventually colonise the block with 1000x antibiotic concentration.
Of course the worrying thing about this experiment is that a malicious actor could presumably produce bacteria which are resistant to almost any antibiotic given a lot of time and agar even if they didn't know anything about the underlying resistance mechanism, thanks to the wonders of natural selection.
I suppose in a sense hospitals are effectively doing this experiment given how common drug resistant bacteria are there.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Probably because he didn't do his undergrad as a biochemist--that's part of why the sequence I suggested included a registered dietician, because while your GP won't necessarily have a deep knowledge of biochemistry and physiology, it's pretty hard to become a registered dietician/nutritionist without it.
But yeah, raising your potassium should help with the mental fog--you might want to step it up carefully, and it might also help some with the sodium since your body will do its best to keep them relatively even. Add in a decent source of calcium if you want to make sure you've got all three of the major ions for your nervous system just to be sure.
A little Googling will reveal that Trehalose is about 11x more expensive than sugar, so this is not a financial play, it is used because of some unique gel behavior as it gets dehydrated, and it's stability at high temperatures. It naturally occurs in Shiitake mushrooms, among other things (15-25% by dry weight). It is also only half as sweet as table sugar, so you have to use more to achieve the same sweetness.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Which is why composite anti-biotics should become the norm. More than one kind in the medication, larger overall dose but the combination should ensure similar side affects are compounded. This to push the bacteria beyond the point where it's DNA can incorporate all the required selective resistances. It can resist any one or two at a time but not multiples of three or more.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen