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.