The deadly fly in the soup!
- From: chatnoir <wolfbat359a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:30:10 -0700 (PDT)
http://tinyurl.com/nswh6v
July 06, 2009
When the Fly in Your Soup May Carry Superbugs
The rise in illnesses due to antibiotic resistant bacteria has always
been both easier and harder to understand than scientists have led us
to believe.
Easier because on the one hand, the problem all boils down to one
maxim: "The more we use them, the faster we lose them (antibiotics,
that is)." In articulating his theory of natural selection, Charles
Darwin fleshed out the concept. We live within a huge ecosystem of
bacteria in which we humans are just one small cog. When we introduce
a stressor into that system—antibiotics—we create the conditions where
the bugs that most naturally resistant those antibiotics will be the
ones that thrive and come to dominate our mutual environments.
Harder to understand, perhaps, because this bacterial ecosystem is a
much more complex, nuanced world than most of us ever think about. It
turns out that bacteria can swap their genes with ease with even
unrelated families of bacteria. This includes the genes that render
them resistant to antibiotics. Moreover, because these drug resistant
genes are often physically connected to one another, bacteria that
before was killable with several antibiotics, could, in one fell
swoop, become much less killable.
What prompted this blog is the latest study (Graham J et al. Sci Total
Environ. April 2009) showing that these bugs and the genes that make
them resistant could be carried by flies—yes, flies—from farms to
elsewhere. Now foolishly, about 70 percent of all antibiotic supplies
in the U.S. are used as additives to animal feed for chickens, pigs
and beef cattle to make them grow faster under more stressful,
confined conditions prevalent in factory farms. Researchers at Johns
Hopkins University looked at poultry manure from these factory farms
and compared the drug resistance of the bacteria in the litter with
the bacteria on the flies collected nearby. And guess what, the drug
resistance was pretty much the same.
We don't know where else those flies were headed to, but wherever it
is, the implications aren't good.
So, next time you do find a fly in your soup, just say, "Waiter, no
superbugs, please."
—David Wallinga,
.
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