http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/April/

An interesting article on bacteria in the soil that thrive when fed antibiotics. Has both good and some bad potential consequences; we cannot kill them easily if the infect us; but they clean up things that might otherwise be considered pollutants.

I cannot tell if the organisms were really "bacteria" and not archaea or some prokaryotic eukaryota. I'd guess not because although many people would call all such things bacteria, scientists shouldn't.

Need permission rights to view.

Wow, that's suprising. I found the article by searching for "bacteria antibiotics" on google and limiting it to news.

Here is another article about the same topic:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/04/04/bacteria-survive-on-all-antibiotic-diet/

The paper only refers to bacteria, from the phyla: Proteobacteria (87%), Actinobacteria (7%), and Bacteroidetes (6%).

Interesting, these buggers aren't just antibiotic-resistant, they actually feed on the antibiotics! Normally, I wouldn't be too worried about soil bacteria infecting people, but I also just saw something on TV this weekend on the mysterious Morgellons Syndrome and some scientists traced it to people being infected with a strain of soil bacteria. Not lethal, but still, these people are suffering with it and apparently there's no cure for it.

Some people have bad dreams about masked guys with chainsaws. I have scary dreams about bacteria.

I thought it was only bacteria and not some other type of organism. But I honestly can not explain the difference between the different types of organisms, and it was not obvious to me in the report.

This story kind of reinforce for me that the best defense we have against a lot of things is our own body and its systems. I had a discussion with DW last night about AIDS and viruses and cures of them. My comment was that humans have never found a cure for a virus. We have created vaccinations, but not cures. Vaccinations are really using the cures developed by the body of one person or animal and sticking it into another.

It also reinforces the idea that one of the great risks to society is still pandemic, so those scary dreams about bacteria are not so out there.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/April/03040803.asp

Fixed the original link.

Another surprising thing is that many of these bacteria were presumably never exposed to antibiotics before. I mean, some of the candidate bacteria were taken from the soil of some forest somewhere, far from human habitation. So these bacteria didn't develop the ability to consume antibiotics as some coping mechanism--they just already could do it.

Thanks. That's interesting stuff.

To tell the truth, I'm not going to get all excited about bacteria that eat antibiotics. As far as I can tell, this is a good thing.

Do you know how many thousands of soil- and water-contaminating manure lagoons there are in this country? The farmers collect the antibiotic-infused, E.coli O157.H7-contaminated manure from their shoulder-to-shoulder, inhumane, disease-proliferating feedlots and dump it into manure lagoons. This is a government-sponsored stupid idea of how to get rid of manure.

Where do you think the antibiotics are going? You're eating the hormones, as my vet says the hormones mostly stay in the body, but the antibiotics are flushed out and added to the water supply. Nice, huh?

I am trying to grow organic vegetables and fruits, but my only local organic dairy is quitting business. I have been trying to find out what happens to the antibiotics in dairy manure, and here Dan just ups and offers the answer.

This is good news to me. It means that the dairy manure can be composted, and the bacteria will eat the antibiotics. Sure, NOT having antibiotics in the composted manure would be better, but that's mostly a daydream.

Bacteria have been around for about three million years, and if we did manage to get rid of all of them, it would also be the end of us. Without bacteria and fungi, there is no humus. Without humus, there is no food.

Anyway, thanks for the info, Dan! You've made my day! Actually, I think you've made my year!

Sue

Well, I guess it depends on your perspective. From a bioremediation standpoint, these little bugs could be very useful. As you point out, heaven knows we pump tons of antibiotics into livestock each year and it just ends up in the soil and water again.

But if you ever managed to get infected with one of these bugs, or it passed its genetic ability to digest antibiotics to another bug that can infect you, you're in for a long road of antibiotic-resistant suffering, assuming the infection doesn't kill you. Or I suppose the "cure" could kill you, too, if the doctors get desperate enough.

The soil didn't cause this problem, and the bacteria didn't start this problem.

Mismanagement and ignorance started this problem. Like most others.

Cynical Sue

An piece in the paper today mentioned the same thing.




http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-briefs5apr05,1,5660585.story

uh... don't you mean BILLION years?

Oh... pick, pick, pick! One tiny little letter and everyone gets excited! Fingers moving faster than brain...

BILLION, yes, BILLION.

Sue

This looks to be the same, or similar, article:
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/n03434274-bacteria-antibiotics/

Bacteria have a nasty habit of exchanging snippets of DNA. And for all practical purposes once a bacterial line develop resistance they never seem to lose it. There was/is at line of thinking that says if a bacterial line isn't exposed to an agent it is resistant to that over time they will lose its resistance. But this hasn't been demonstrated. It doesn't mean it isn't true to some degree. Perhaps it takes a thousand or more years for the effect to be seen. Unfortunately, given the rate at which bacteria are developing resistance we don't have a thousand years.

Antibiotics should be much less widely dispensed. The main reason why cattle get antibiotics is because we tightly pack them on feed lots where they live 24/7 in their own excrement. In those conditions antibiotics are vital to prevent infections and contagion in the close-packed herd. Range-fed cattle fatten up more slowly but they much more rarely need any antibiotics.

Humans taking antibiotics excrete them relatively unmodified in their waste. If we really want to limit the development of resistance we might think of enforcing use and isolating the waste stream from people taking critical antibiotics. These wastes would be disposed of by means which destroy the antibiotics. High temperature incineration should do it.

In the wider view you have to remember that most, if not all, have their origin in bacteria and fungus. Penicillin from bread mold as an example. It took, presumably, millions of years for the tiny critters to develop this material. While humans like to think we developed them in fact we just use what others had originally created.

IMHO we need to make best use and preserve any advantage we can. Blowing the benefits of an antibiotic on useless activities or because we are lazy about how we raise livestock is foolish.

... "mysterious Morgellons Syndrome and some scientists traced it to people being infected with a strain of soil bacteria."

There is very little evidence that says this is anything but hypochondria and a desire to be 'special'. Essentially a psychological condition. Possibly including a form of Münchhausen's syndrome. The supposed relationship between a known bacteria and Morgellans, assuming it is an actual disease, is based entirely on a known tendency of this bacteria to produce something resembling threads and an assumption that the visually similar stringy structures have something in common. So far there is little to no evidence to support this assumption.

Antibiotics have been around almost as long as bacteria have been. Penicillin is a mold that grows in the soil in temperate climates, and has been for a long time. Some antibiotics are synthetic, but many originated from natural sources.

As for the endochrine waste cycle, we've addressed that before, and I think it is safe to say that hormones and pharmaceutical excretions into the environment have a relatively short half life due to biologic processes, free radical decay, and other incdental chemical treatments.

This is like the DDT blowout in the 70s, when everyone was sure we would destroy the ecosystem. Come to find out migratory waterfowl populations have not been decimated by DDT, despite it's persistence and a wholesale lack of effort at remediation. What's more, all those waterfowl that head to central America for the winter go places where widespread use of DDT continued long after it was banned in the US (in some places down south, it is still being used to control malaria). Not something the enviro-mentals will admit openly. So much for "Silent Spring".

With ambient levels of undesirable waste products sitting at ppb still, and the fact that these products do not bioaccumulate, I would be more concerned about sunspot activity increasing the background radiation levels, which I am not. Besides, RO filters on waste stream outfalls are being mandated more and more, which fairly preclude the long chain molecule strands like hormones and pharmaceuticals from re-entering the environment. Septic tanks are a bigger problem, but with the cost of installing those now solidly in 5 figures, I expect process tanks to replace them more and more. Even so, the wee beasties in both septic systems and wastewater treatment plants do a pretty good job of digesting most of the organic waste products into inert constituents.