Godlike Productions - Reply to Thread

Users Online Now: 1,632 (Who's On?)	Visitors Today: 722,935
Pageviews Today: 1,320,348	Threads Today: 630	Posts Today: 10,789
02:47 PM

REPLY TO THREAD

Subject Superbugs spied off the Antarctic coast

User Name

Font color: Font:

In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss and no more than 50% of the source material, provide a link back to the original article and provide your original comments / criticism in your post with the article.

Original Message This is doom writ large:

BACTERIA that can resist nearly all antibiotics have been found in Antarctic seawater.

Björn Olsen of Uppsala University in Sweden and colleagues took seawater samples between 10 and 300 metres away from Chile's Antarctic research stations, Bernardo O'Higgins, Arturo Prat and Fildes Bay. A quarter of the samples of Escherichia coli bacteria carried genes that made an enzyme called ESBL, which can destroy penicillin, cephalosporins and related antibiotics (Applied and Environmental Microbiology, DOI: 10.1128/AEM.07320-11).

Bacteria with these genes can be even more dangerous than the better known superbug MRSA. That's because the genes sit on a mobile chunk of DNA that can be acquired by many species of bacteria, increasing the incidence of drug-resistant infections such as the E. coli outbreak last year in Germany.

[link to www.newscientist.com]

Pictures (click to insert)





\| Next Page >>