Resistance To Antibiotics Found In Isolated Amazonian Tribe 53
sciencehabit writes When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami's gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array of antibiotic-resistance genes, according to a new study, even though these mountain people had never ingested antibiotics or animals raised with drugs. The find suggests that microbes have long evolved the capability to fight toxins, including antibiotics, and that preventing drug resistance may be harder than scientists thought.
Re: It Has Begun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: It Has Begun! (Score:5, Insightful)
More plausibly is that there's an array of antibiotic sources in their diet/cultural medicine that led them to develop a resistance.
Re: It Has Begun! (Score:5, Insightful)
I would expect that to be the case
I would even go further out on the limb and suggest that antibiotic resistant bacteria have always been present
It is imply the presence of antibiotic substances that weed out the rest of the bacteria, leaving the resistant ones as the 'last man standing' so that we notice them
It is not so much the case that our use of antibiotics have caused antibiotic resistant strains to 'develop', we have simply eliminated the rest and exposed the resistant ones
Re: It Has Begun! (Score:4, Interesting)
Four comments in, and this discussion is effectively over.
Yes, random mutations happen randomly. Sometimes they happen in hospitals using antibiotics, but usually they happen anywhere else. Sometimes, those mutations happen to survive long enough to become widespread through a population. Sometimes that population is isolated, and the mutation becomes common. Sometimes a particular antibiotic (natural or synthesized) affects the balance of variants in the population.
Very rarely, we humans have suitable circumstances to actually notice.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that it is debatable whether the widespread use of antibiotics have exposed an existing population of antibiotic resistant bacteria, or if there have been recent mutations that have allowed bacteria to survive antibiotics
This paper discusses bot the existence of antibiotic resistance strains of bacteria, and the non-mutative processes that are involved in transferring resistant r-genes between different types of bacteria
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
You left out 1 1/2 considerations:
1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).
another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environment
Re: (Score:2)
I remembered something about them digging up gut bacteria from something like 200 years ago in England - well before human use of antibiotics, and found that the gut bacteria in the corpses they exhumed were resistant to more antibiotics than modern versions.
But in looking for it, I found a study that they've found antibiotic resistances from 30,000 year old DNA [nature.com] from permafrost.
Which kind of makes sense. How did we develop penicillin? From Fungi. Which has been around for quite a while itself. Where did
Re: (Score:2)
It is quite common for people in places without refrigerators to eat moldy food and the like.
Re: (Score:1)
Indeed. Moldy foods and the like (lactic acid bacteria, yeasts) have been used as preservatives by humans for millennia. Things like:
Re: It Has Begun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
A far more plausible answer is what the researchers concluded: microbes are in a constant battle with each other, one develops a toxin to kill a second, the second develops resistance to that toxin.
The genes they found are naturally occurring and are the same genes bacteria use to develop resistance to the antibiotics we use. It would have been far more surprising if the bacteria didn't carry those genes.
Re: (Score:1)
Actually, you need to run from these people, because they only have these microbes because they have been messing with some nasty viruses.
Awkward (Score:1)
On first contact they asked for faeces samples.
Re: Awkward (Score:1)
Hi we are from a far more advanced civilisation, would you mind pooping into this jar?
Re: (Score:3)
What do you think the anal probes are for that the Greys use when they abduct us?
That's what happens when you take the easy way (Score:1)
I imagine industrialized societies are getting weaker as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Ima gonna haveta disagree.. (Score:2)
I think it's more likely that the antibiotic resistance microbes found their way in from the ecosystem polluted by the even distant civilization rather than "developed" spontaneously on their own (though that's obviously possible)
If we're to believe that climate change is a worldwide phenomenon caused by concentrated/isolated pollution sources it's not that farfetched to believe there's a similar mechanism for antibiotic resistant bacteria developed in a "civilized" area to find its way to uncivilized areas
Re:Ima gonna haveta disagree.. (Score:5, Informative)
It should be possible to figure out which it is by comparing the genome of the resistant bacteria, and see if they have common genes for the resistance.
But I don't see why it would be so difficult for the local bacteria to develop resistance. Many antibiotics are based on stuff we find in nature, and the amazonian tribe probably uses natural substances to fight diseases. Resistance would be a logical result of that.
Re: (Score:2)
"Prevent"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people believe that preventing drug resistance is still possible? You can only switch to a drug they aren't resistant to yet, or to whose resistance they have lost.
Re: (Score:3)
You can slow down the rate at which bacteria become resistant.
Re: (Score:2)
Bacteria are more like a city of people and less like a field of crops. When a new type of bacteria joins a location, it tries to talk to all of the bacteria around it (even outside it's species) using chemical triggers or even electrical pulses. When one type of bacteria is having troubles, either by not getting what it needs to survive or being attack
Re: (Score:1)
If we quit indiscriminately immersing our world in antibiotics, we won't be so strongly selecting for these resistances.
Re: (Score:2)
Right. Just let people die of curable disases to avoid antibiotic resistance.
Re: (Score:2)
Find a dictionary and look up 'indiscriminately'.
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
Not completely new: (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more confirmation, but it has already been known in the microbiology community for some time.
Many of the genes that contribute to antibiotic resistance are far older than human use of antibiotics.
How can that be? A couple ways. Mom Nature has been playing the antibiotic game for a very long time. Most of our antibiotics come from antibiotic producing organisms in nature (penicillin for example). The countermeasures have long been out there, but only in a small percentage of the bacteria out there, since there is a small cost to maintaining any given gene. When there is a big exposure to a particular antibiotic, the resistance genes spread through the bacterial community and become common, as we often see nowadays.
The other source is that an enzyme that is used for some other purpose may well have some ability to protect against an antibiotic. An example would be a transporter molecule for some substance other than the antibiotic to be pumped out of the cell that is close enough to sometimes pump out the antibiotic. There would then be strong pressure for the bacteria to make more of that transporter protein when the antibiotic is around. Nature is good at using something it already has for a new purpose.
That's one of the reasons antibiotic resistance is such a problem. Mother Nature has been playing this game a very long time and frankly is better at it than we are.
Amazing! (Score:1)
It's almost as if the microbes we get antibiotics from have been around for millions of years...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I recall an article a few years back about one of those Amazonian tribes that wanted nothing to do with western civilization. There was a photo of a couple of tribesmen wearing New York Knicks tee shirts and a few Tupperware containers visible near the cooking fire.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really think they were never visited by a missionary?
Missionary? More likely "Missionary Style"! What is the first thing that they do, when an advanced culture meets a primitive culture? They mutually exchange sexually transmitted diseases!
Who knows? Maybe the villagers were visited by some folks, who didn't want to tell the government where they were, and what they were up to? Like, drug dealers, illegal good miners or illegal loggers?
Or how about contamination that occurred during the testing? People working with Ebola patients were supposed to how
Re: (Score:2)
Silly question (Score:3)
I'm assuming these people, isolated though they were, did not drink water or feed from animals exposed to water tainted with anti-biotic runoff?
You could grow up on an undiscovered island and still have ingested plastics. The smoke doesn't always stay on its side of the restaurant.
Re: (Score:1)
Missionaries taste like chicken.
Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Their environment has some awesome naturally-occurring antibiotic that the local bacteria have had to develop resistance to, and we might want to learn more about that.
even worse (Score:2)