Ancient antibiotic-resistant bacteria discovered

This sounds scary, but the discovery hasn’t changed levels of resistance, it has just better educated scientists .

…researchers have made a remarkable discovery — bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, even though they have been pristinely isolated from human contact for more than four million years.

…”This has important clinical implications,” Wright said. “It suggests that there are far more antibiotics in the environment that could be found and used to treat currently untreatable infections.”

…An analysis showed none are capable of causing human disease, but almost all are resistant to at least one antibiotic, with some able to fend off up to 14 of the drugs.

…In all, resistance was found to virtually every antibiotic that doctors currently use to treat patients.

Further research could uncover new antibiotics, which while the ancient bacteria might be resistant it, common bacteria might succumb to it for some time.