Apparently, bacteria have started to become resistant to antibiotics, so I guess no more
sewer diving for me!
Antibiotic resistance is scary.
When bacteria stop responding to antibiotics, diseases that used to be easily treatable
can become deadly.
Each year in the United States alone, at least 23,000 people get infected and die from antibiotic-resistant
bacteria.
On previous episodes of DNews we’ve talked about some of the most threatening types,
including certain strains of E. coli, MRSA, which causes staph infections, and Gonorrhea.
Yes, gonorrhea is becoming resistant to medications.
Clearly antibiotic resistance is a huge problem, so scientists have been seeking out better,
more effective treatments to deal with bacteria that are already resistant.
To dive into this story, DNews teamed up with our friends at Seeker Stories to look for
treatment solutions where we least expect them: the bottom of the ocean.
Off the coast of California, scientists from UC-Santa Cruz are scouring the ocean for what
they hope is the key to fighting a new breed of drug-resistant superbugs.
Bryson: So right here in Monterey Bay looking for the next potential medical breakthrough,
but how we going to do that?
Roger: So the first thing we need to do is make our scuba dive and collect the samples,
and we’re going to make pairs of duplicate samples during the dive in as many discrete
locations as we can, and then take these samples back to the lab for work up.
Interviewer: How cold is the water?
Roger: Oh, the water’s 55.
Interviewer: You’ve got a dry suit, and I’ve got…
Roger: I’ve got my dry suit, you have a wet suit, we’ll see how we fare.
According to the CDC, at least 2 million people in the U.S. become infected with drug resistant
bacteria and at least 23,000 die each year as a result of these infections.
Roger: So there hasn’t been a new antibiotic developed in about 20 years, and the rate
of resistance to existing antibiotics in hospitals can run upwards of 40% to 60%.
Bryson: Wow.
Given that it takes about 15 years to bring a drug to market, there is a real pressing
crisis in the antibiotic discovery arena.
Bryson: So you say it’s a crisis; I mean, if you had to write on a scale of 1 to 10,
where are we at on the antibiotic crisis?
Roger: Eleven.
It’s very serious.
We are about to return to a pre-antibiotic era where even basic surgeries and other medical
procedures can lead to death by septicemia or another untreatable bacterial pathogens.
The history of antibiotics is relatively short.
In 1928, Scottish Scientist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, capable of killing
bacteria.
Scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain then mass produced it in time for the use on Allied
Forces during World War two - the first example.
in which more soldier died in battle than from infection.
It drastically changed the world of modern medicine and extended the average human lifespan
significantly.
Not many more antibiotics were developed since then.
Bryson: Now, why has the discovery of new antibiotics kind of fallen by the wayside
for the past 30 or 40 years?
Roger: Developing new antibiotics is not the most effective way to make a steady profit.
If you make a new drug for asthma or diabetes, that’s a drug which patients will take likely,
every day for the rest of their lives.
So from an economic perspective, drug companies don’t have much incentive to develop new
antibiotic drugs.
As Fleming accepted his Nobel Prize in 1945, he warned that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics
could result in drug resistant bacteria and he was right.
Roger: if you put antibiotics into heavy use, then eventually, bacteria will find a way
to become resistant to those drugs.
It hasn’t been helped by the poor use of antibiotics.
For example, for people with flu-like symptoms, if you have a viral infection, antibiotics
don’t help, and the more you take antibiotics, the more you are helping to sort of build
that pool of resistance range.
Bryson: It’s kind of like the boy who cried wolf; like, if you cry wolf all the time,
and then when you actually have a wolf, then it doesn’t work?
Roger: Right.
Exactly.
So it’s a combination of factors that have led to this.
Roger's team of diver collect sand from the sea floor, a relatively understudied environment
for medical research, but one that is rich with unknown chemistry.
The scientists hope that the microbes within the sand could lead to new and powerful drugs
to fight bacteria.
The scientists hope that the microbes within the sand could lead to new and powerful drugs
to fight bacteria.
However, the search area is large and it might take years to determine if these samples hold
a cure.
Bryson: So let’s see the samples.
Roger: Okay.
So here we are, so this what we managed to get on this dive.
And although they may look pretty similar to the naked eye, at the microbial level,
every one of these is a completely different population.
Bryson: And I mean, it’s literally just sand.
Roger: It’s just sand.
So this is very low impact science on the environment, but the potential applications
are huge.// Roger: So what happens next is // we will
take the sand, put it on Petri dishes, and allow those microorganisms to grow, and then
a microbiologist will look at those and select specific species for study for chemistry.
Bryson: So this could come from this?
Roger: Absolutely.
Roger: It’s possible that the microorganisms in this sample may one day make compounds
which we can add to tablets like this to treat diseases, including Malaria, and of course,
antibiotics.
Bryson: That’s amazing.
Bryson: I mean, the cure to what we’re looking for could be anywhere, in the oceans, in the
mountains, in the sky.
Roger: Right.
And if you tried to do that discovery in a random way where you went into the environment
at random you would fail.
There are many Millions of sequences that we have not yet investigated; deciding how
to do that in an ordered way is the challenge for the next generation of natural product
scientists.
Misusing antibiotics can lead to drug resistance and disease, as it did for Ryan Schneider.
He was diagnosed with C.diff and tried a revolutionary treatment in this episode of Seeker Stories.
Check it out here.
Trace: Do you feel weird about having somebody else's fecal material put into your body?
Ryan: It was weird at first but I don't even think about that at all anymore because the
way I feel now is weird.
You know?
I want to feel back to normal.
I don't really care about what it takes to get that.
I just want to feel normal again.
What do you think?
Are you worried about resistant bacteria?
Let us know down in the comments.
And for more stories like this, don’t forget to like and subscribe to both DNews and Seeker
Stories.
Thanks for watching.