Apocalypse Pathogens Rising

There was a time when even minor surgery could be a death sentence if you went to a hospital, due to bacterial infection. That time may be returning:

We’re one giant step closer to the end of antibiotics.

Just last month, Yi-Yun Liu’s team discovered the mcr-1 gene, which conveys resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort. They were doing a surveillance project on E. coli bacteria from food animals in China. A whopping 15% of meat samples and 21% of animals tested between 2011 and 2014 also had bacteria that carried this gene. The researchers from South China also found this resistance gene in E. coli and Klebsiella pneumonia isolates from 16 hospitalized patients’ blood, urine or other sites. The isolates were all very resistant ESBL bacteria to begin with, so now were resistant to all antibiotics.

It gets worse. This week, Frank Aarestrup’s team, from the Danish National Food Institute, reported that they also searched their collection of bacteria, looking for this new gene. They found the mcr-1 gene in the blood of a patient and in 5 poultry samples that originated in Germany between 2012-14. The patient had not left the country and was believed to have become infected by eating contaminated meat. The genes found in the poultry were identical to those from the Danish patient and from China…

The mcr-1 gene transfers resistance to E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas—common bacteria—by plasmids, small bits of DNA that can be transferred to different types of bacteria. Previously, colistin resistance was transferred on chromosomes, and therefore affected only those bacteria and their descendants. Plasmid-borne resistance genes are more likely to be rapidly spread widely, and can spread between species of bacteria…

Currently, the U.S. imports tilapia from China, some of which has been contaminated by manure, and much of which is farm-raised and likely exposed to antibiotics…

Dr. Price raises another intriguing possibility as well; he’s found that some urinary tract infections are foodborne in origin, with multi-drug resistant E. coli being correlating with eating poultry. “We are really facing a time when we could be finding an untreatable uropathogen in our food. We don’t recognize urogenic E. coli as a foodborne pathogen.”

It has also been found in Malaysia, and I would not be surprised if it is floating around in America.

It gives you an idea of how interconnected the world is, and how fast a pandemic will move when it arises. This bacterial strain is almost certainly energetically inefficient outside of the antibiotic rich environment it evolved to exploit, and yet it is on the move globally.

On the other hand, as all the old and sick people in hospitals are killed back, Obamacare may end up almost solvent. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Obama released it as a sort of death panel without the ability to appeal.

Obviously, borders are evolutionarily advantageous for reasons beyond merely protecting one’s food supply.

Apocalypse cometh™