Soil Microbes Study Renews Antibiotic Fears

In today's Calgary Herald: ( In part..)

Soil microbes study renews antibiotic fears

'Stunning' level of immunity makes drugs useless'

Canadian scientists have discovered a vast reservoir of microbial weapons underground that could render antibiotics useless.

The researchers plucked 480 different soil microbes from farms, forests and urban areas from British Columbia to northern Ontario and found

organisms possess a "stunning" level of resistance to antibiotic drugs.

Not only are the microbes immune to medicines that have been on the market for years, they are such masters of biowarfare they could

blunt the effects of new antibiotic drugs, one of which has yet to be marketed in Canada.

"They are just chewing it up, eating it for breakfast," says biochemist Gerard Wright, head of the team at McMaster University in Hamilton. ( SEE ATTACHMENT)

The finding described as"remarkable" in the journal Science Today, give an unprecedented glimpse of the microbial world beneath our feet.

They also point to a vast natural reservoir of antibiotic resistance that could find it's way into human pathogens, creating more superbugs that are resistant to drugs and a growing global menace.

Microbes are known to swap genes for drug resistance like trading cards and the study provides new evidence some resistance from the "under ground world" has already made the leap.

Many Staphylococcal infections seen in North American hospitals no longer respond to the antibiotic Vancomycin, and the researchers have shown they use a mechanism identical to the one in soil bacteria.

They suspect soil microbes passed the genes responsible for Vancomycin resistance to organisms living in the guts of animals and humans on European farms, where the drug was widely used in the 80's. Resistant microbes soon spread around the world and, by the 1990's Vancomycin-resistant infections in patients in North America intensive care units, hospitals and long-term care facilities.

The new study show the soil microbes have many more tricks and could render new and future antibiotics useless and obsolete. "The minute you start to use a new antibiotic, there is going to be something out there that is going to have a mechanism to get around it" says Wright, who emphasizes the need to use antibiotics

sparingly to delay the day bacteria will grow resistant to them.

Antibiotics are widely used on farms, where they are routinely fed to animals and fish to prevent disease and boost growth rates.

In some parts of the world they are also dusted and sprayed on crops.

Glyconutrients enrich the affects of antioxidents.