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

Link to the actual article

[Wrath0fb0b]

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.

Re:highlight

[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.

The Actual Process

[LeftCoastThinker]

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.

Re: Something for Nothing

[yndrd1984]

Sucrose, glucose, and fructose are the sugars that the FDA actually considers sugar.

That's not a citation, that's just assertion. So I'll do the work for you:

According to this the term "no sugar added" may only be used if no sugar was added using the definition of sugar found here, which states "sugars shall be defined as the sum of all free mono- and disaccharides (such as glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose)."

Trehalose is a disaccharide, so...