The Time To Prepare Is Now
In 1945, Alexander Fleming, a pioneer in antibiotics, said, “the misuse of penicillin could be the propagation of mutant forms of bacteria that would resist the new miracle drug.”
Even now, few are listening, and the consequences could be severe. It could mean that friends and family won’t live as long in the future. Please read on…
This is from New Scientist last year:
Dosing livestock with antibiotics can be bad for farmers’ health. A strain of MRSA that causes skin infections and sepsis in farm workers evolved its resistance to antibiotics inside farm animals.
The ST398 strain of MRSA first appeared in 2003 and is prevalent in US livestock. Humans who pick it up from animals can become dangerously ill, but it cannot yet spread from human to human.
And now, according to The Daily Mail, strain ST398 is showing up in British milk:
Scientists tested 1,500 samples of bulk milk and found seven cases of MRSA ST398 from five farms in England, Scotland and Wales.
It might not be long before the sometimes deadly ST398 evolves, developing the ability to be transmitted between humans. One more tragic antibiotic fail waiting to unfold.
An educated opinion on this news can be found at Wired.com.
Note: The pasteurization process should kill MRSA, but not all milk and cheese is pasteurized.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania investigated UK data covering over 1.5 million visits to doctors by 800,000 people with upper respiratory infections over a period of 20 years.
Just over 65% of the patients, who were all adults, received antibiotics for their infections. The patients were studied over 15 days following their first doctor visit to see how many were admitted to the hospital with pneumonia or any adverse event that might be related to the administration of the drugs, such as heart problems, liver or kidney toxicity, diarrhea and seizures.
Overall, there were 296 people admitted to the hospital with a case of pneumonia within 15 days of the initial doctor visit. That was 22 people admitted to a hospital with pneumonia for each 100,000 doctor visits if they did not receive an antibiotic – and 18 people per 100,000 who were treated with antibiotics.
Researchers said that “12,255 or more people would have to be treated with antibiotics to prevent one person from being hospitalized.” We aren’t even talking about saving lives, just saving hospitalization. Considering the harm that antibiotics do to an individual’s gut health, and the rise of super bugs, it is immediately obvious that prescribing antibiotics for upper respiratory infections should be made illegal.
But no, we’ll keep on trusting that doctors know best.
It makes sense that some members of the animal world have their own forms of antibiotic resistance, and that some might be easy to harvest by humans, or more likely, be synthesized.
The skin of Australian Green-eyed Tree Frogs have an antimicrobial secretion that is being used to create new drugs in the war against superbugs such as Golden Staph.
Although frogs have lungs, they absorb oxygen through their skin, and for this to occur efficiently, the skin must be moist. A disadvantage of moist skin is pathogens can thrive on it, increasing the chance of infection. To counteract this, frogs secrete peptides that destroy these pathogens. The skin secretion from the green tree frog contains caerins, a group of peptides with antibacterial and antiviral properties. It also contains caerulins, which have the same physiological effects as CCK-8, a digestive hormone and hunger suppressant. Several peptides from the skin secretions of the green tree frog have been found to destroy HIV without harming healthy T-cells.
[Source: Wikipedia]
It all comes down to investigating how the ingredients of the secretions interact with cell membranes – if scientists can work that out they might be able to create more viable antibiotics. The two techniques they are utilizing are X-ray scattering and a neutron reflectometer.
The Chief Medical Officer of England is concerned about the rise of “superbugs”, and is calling for urgent action. Unfortunately this is about a decade too late – the damage is done.
If tough measures are not taken to restrict the use of antibiotics and no new ones are discovered, said Dame Sally Davies, “we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th century at some point”.
“Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat,” said Davies. “If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics. And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection.
Suggested strategies include:
Full story at The Guardian.
It is well documented that the BIG antibiotic problem is overuse in agriculture, where quicker weight gains can be achieved while humans face an enormous tragedy because of it.
But it is perhaps more sobering when presented as a percentage. Or in a graph:
Or, just under 80%. And in case you are wondering, yes meat production is on the rise, but not nearly as fast as agricultural antibiotic use. And of course human populations are growing as well…
Read the post at Mother Jones for the full story, but here’s a sobering fact:
The correct term is fecal transplant – it involves liquidizing the stool of a healthy donor, and then injecting it into the patient’s large intestine. This can recolonize the healthy bacteria in your gut, if it has been lost due to the overuse of antibiotics. So far it has had great success, but there are regulatory hurdles to overcome. The FDA only approves drugs, devices, vaccines and tissues. Feces aren’t in their brief, and without the permission of the FDA, clinical trials cannot proceed.
The condition it has fixed (90% of the time) is a Clostridium difficule infection that results in constant diarrhea because it has taken over the gut and good bacteria are unable to re-establish themselves.
The full story is at Scientific American.
Most people contract MRSA in a hospital environment – in fact 18,000 Americans do just that (and then die) every year.
Less well-known is that MRSA exists in some more natural environments that don’t have much to do with humans.
The latter two have typically been infected by humans, while the disease appears in pig sties thanks to the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in livestock. These are all directly attributable to human activity.
So where did MRSA originate from?
Researchers led by epidemiologist Tara Smith of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health in Iowa City took samples from 114 animals that came into the Wildlife Care Clinic, which rehabilitates injured or orphaned animals, at Iowa State University in Ames. Seven of the animals, or 6.1%, carried S. aureus that was sensitive to methicillin; these included owls, pigeons, a beaver, a heron, and a squirrel. Three animals, or 2.6%, carried MRSA: two Eastern cottontail rabbits and a lesser yellowlegs, a migratory shorebird. (For comparison’s sake: An estimated 1.5% of Americans carry MRSA in their noses.) [Source: Science Magazine]
It is presumed that these wild animals have never received any antibiotics, nor would they have had contact with humans – so they most probably have picked up the bugs directly from their local environment.
Worryingly, one of the pigeons was carrying a strain of MRSA that was resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin – acknowledged as the last defense.
So, unfortunately for us, considering all the positive advances being made to make hospitals safer, a wild-animal-borne epidemic is a possibility, just one strain variation away. Imagine if it started spreading among pet cats or dogs?
To date this has been a controversial topic. Scientists are increasingly accepting the importance of gut flora, but seemingly logical remedies like probiotic yoghurt doesn’t seem to be much help.
A common hospital bacteria is in dire need of having its incidences reduced:
Clostridium difficile is a menace in hospitals and nursing homes, causing nearly 336,000 infections and 14,000 deaths a year in the United States. Antibiotics can temporarily knock down the bacterium, but about 25% of infected people relapse, often multiple times, because the germ produces spores that hand sanitizers and hand washing don’t kill. Antibiotics can also backfire because they kill the gut’s normal microbial community, clearing the way for C. difficile to resettle.
[Source: Science Mag]
A controversial remedy will be reported here tomorrow, using the excrement from healthy people…
Fortunately scientists have now isolated the beneficial bacteria from the fecal remedy, so these bacteria can be directly applied in a more acceptable manner. Mice only at this stage:
…identify a simple mixture of six phylogenetically diverse intestinal bacteria, including novel species, which can re-establish a health-associated microbiota and clear C. difficile027/BI infection from mice. Thus, targeting a dysbiotic microbiota with a defined mixture of phylogenetically diverse bacteria can trigger major shifts in the microbial community structure that displaces C. difficile and, as a result, resolves disease and contagiousness.
[Source: PLOS]
It’s hard to believe, but as recently as World War Two prisoners were constantly dropping dead from pneumonia and dysentery – hear it from someone who knows: