[Pharmwaste] Drug-resistant superbugs may have found a new foe in the Irish soil

[Deborah DeBiasi]

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/drug-resistant-superbugs-may-have-found-new-foe-irish-soil-n984016



[image: Image: Irish Soil Drone 1]

Soil from an area of Northern Ireland once occupied by the Druids has long
been believed to have almost miraculous curative powers.NBC News

March 17, 2019, 3:27 PM EDT

By Linda Carroll and Lauren Dunn

As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become more common and more deadly, the
solution to this relatively new problem may come from a bit of old Irish
folklore and tradition.

For microbiologist Gerry Quinn, the search for new medications led back to
his childhood home in Ireland. On a hunch, he followed up on some folklore
his family had passed on to him: Old timers insisted that the dirt in the
vicinity of a nearly 1,500-year-old church in County Fermanagh in Northern
Ireland, an area once occupied by the Druids, had almost miraculous
curative powers.

“Countries still retain ethnic folk medicine and a lot of that medicine is
forgotten. But here in the western fringes of Ireland there is still a
tradition of having this folk cure,” Quinn told NBC News. “We can look at
it and see maybe it's just superstition — or we can actually investigate
and ask, 'is there anything in the soil that produces antibiotics?' "

There is precedent.

“A lot of the antibiotics we have now are so-called natural products,” said
Dr. Allan Coukell, senior director of health programs at the PEW Charitable
Trust. “That means they’re molecules that actually existed in nature and
that the bacteria and other living creatures have developed as a form of
defense.”

MARCH 17, 201902:01

The World Health Organization
<https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antibiotic-resistance> calls
antibiotic resistance one of the top 10 public health threats in 2019. This
rapid growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria has made Quinn’s and other
scientists’ search more urgent.

“To put it in perspective, every year in the United States at least 23,000
people die from an antibiotic resistant infection," Coukell said. "That’s
like a jumbo jet crashing every week.”

Once Quinn and his team decided to focus on the Irish soil, they narrowed
their search to a specific type of bacteria, called Streptomyces, because
other strains of this bacteria have led to the development of 75 percent of
existing antibiotics, Quinn said. The bacteria was discovered by a team
<https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-12/su-bfi122718.php> based at
Swansea University Medical School, made up of researchers from Wales,
Brazil, Iraq and Northern Ireland.

The researchers first tried the newly discovered strain of Streptomyces on
some garden variety bacteria. In their petri dish experiment, “it knocked
them out,” Quinn said. “Then we thought we’d take it one step further and
find some multi-resistant organisms.", 201905:36

The bacteria in the experiment killed four out of the top six organisms
that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA.

"It’s quite surprising,” said Quinn.

Quinn and his team described their experience in a study published last
fall in Frontiers in Microbiology.Related

[image:
https://media4.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2018_31/2516636/180801-vancomycin-resistant_enterococcus-bacteria-cdc-ew-1147a_c0cf0b3791a9a02293d581cae86b8248.focal-60x60.jpg]
HEALTH
<https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/drug-resistant-superbugs-may-have-just-learned-new-trick-n896606?icid=related>

Drug-resistant superbugs may have just learned a new trick
<https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/drug-resistant-superbugs-may-have-just-learned-new-trick-n896606?icid=related>

Most of our antibiotics “trace to naturally occurring microbial based
substances that bacteria or funguses produce,” Vaughn Cooper, evolutionary
geneticist and microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine told NBC News. To survive and thrive, these microorganisms need to
come up with antibiotics and other compounds that will vanquish competing
neighbors, he explained.

While the research shows promise, it’s a long way from the petri dish to an
antibiotic that will kill superbugs in human beings.

Still, “it’s a cool discovery,” said Cooper.

[image: Image: Irish Soil Varicam]

In a lab experiment, the new strain of bacteria found in the soil of
Northern Ireland knocked out multi-resistant organisms.NBC News

“Bioprospecting”— the search for new drugs in plants and animals — has
great promise, but before any newly discovered compounds can make it to the
clinic, it must be proven that they not only can kill dangerous bacteria,
but also that they won’t harm human, Cooper said.

“The strength of this report is that whatever this strain of Streptomyces
is producing is effective against a broad sample of pathogens,” he added.

Meanwhile, the search has taught Quinn about the search for new medications.

“The lesson is, some of the cures are right underneath your feet,” he said.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dep.state.fl.us/pipermail/pharmwaste/attachments/20190318/b82c041a/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 68023 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.dep.state.fl.us/pipermail/pharmwaste/attachments/20190318/b82c041a/attachment-0003.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 2065 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.dep.state.fl.us/pipermail/pharmwaste/attachments/20190318/b82c041a/attachment-0004.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 41447 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.dep.state.fl.us/pipermail/pharmwaste/attachments/20190318/b82c041a/attachment-0005.jpg>