Antibiotic resistance among germs swells during droughts, study suggests
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Maybe it would have been better had I read this before relocating from a wet climate zone to a dry one.
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Uhh, antimicrobial resistance is my field of expertise, and so this should be a very interesting paper but there is something super wonky about the data and analyses being presented. Particularly the "clinical resistance" information that they're saying correlates extremely well with aridity. The correlation seen in the figure they present below definitely is not as clear cut as they make it (look at the enormous spread of resistance %s). But also they present some data that is really iffy, like the image which indicates that antibiotic resistance is predicted to decrease in the American SouthEast from 2025-2050, which literally nobody who works in the South of the US believes (also the number of significant typos, like "antiobiotic resistance"). This paper smells really fishy, and I don't really trust the statistical correlations they are presenting.
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Do you mind if I ask a stupid question?
… and struggle somewhat in how to phrase that question
With my very layman understanding and admittedly brief scan of this article (not actual paper) but it seems to me if antibiotic resistance is a response to competition between bacteria, which is also the source of most antibiotics.
Then shouldn’t it follow that whenever that competition heats up, in cases of stress like a drought or any non beneficial change in environment or even in the case of a beneficial change like colonizing a new environment, that the logical assumption is that resistance should also rise?
I know that’s fairly simplistic, and in no way devaluing careful data gathering to confirm or deny and in no way trying to validate the conclusions of this paper, but it does seem a fairly obvious assumption.
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Well, for one thing, most antibiotics (at least the ones we use in medicine) aren't from bacteria, they're from fungi.
For another, antibiotic resistance often comes at a real cost, depending on the mechanism. When competition heats up in any other way, it's the bacteria who aren't paying that cost who win the competition.
Colonizing a new environment is almost the opposite of competition... I don't understand why you think resistance rises in all these vey different cases? What would make resistance decrease, in your world?
For another, antibiotic resistance often comes at a real cost, depending on the mechanism. When competition heats up in any other way, it's the bacteria who aren't paying that cost who win the competition.
Colonizing a new environment is almost the opposite of competition... I don't understand why you think resistance rises in all these vey different cases? What would make resistance decrease, in your world?
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I was thinking competition would rise during colonization as bacteria raced to exploit the new resources
really I was thinking of competition more like stress .. anything that would spur adaptation
and I was aware that most antibiotics like penicillin come from mold and fungi
I’m also fairly aware that bacteria tend to share resistance rather freely amongst themselves
But yeah, .. as I said I wasn’t thinking too deeply
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I think in the non-human environment that supposition is very reasonable. Stressors can definitely cause shifts in bacterial and fungal responses, though whether thats towards production of resistance mechanisms or against I'm not sure it's so clean cut.
However, what I don't think is well supported by THIS data, is the supposition that environmental bacterial shifts are major drivers of clinical infection phenotypes (what kinds of bacteria people get infected with). The bacterial ecosystems that surround humans are super specific to the human environment (houses and their water/sewage systems, gathering places, healthcare), and those specific areas have a lot of antimicrobial exposure that isn't from bacteria (primarily through human usage). While the diversity of antibiotics is probably not as divers as those produced by other bacteria/fungi, the actual environmental dose from humans outweighs natural production by multiple orders of magnitude, and we know for a fact that exposure promotes resistance. So I would assume (and previous data supports) that human antibiotic usage patterns would be a very strong influence on clinical infections. The fact that they purport to show such a strong correlation with aridity that dominates other factors to the point where a consistent trend is observable is what seems very fishy to me. It's very much a "too good to be true" kind of suspicion.
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Well you could argue that this is another of Dr. Mole's gruesome stories. Only in this case the horror comes from the statistical treatment of the data, not the bugs under discussion... How in Students' name they can get the standard deviation they are showing, given the spread of the data points, is indeed a point of grave concern.
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Scientists and statistics don't mix well. They don't spend the time to understand the analysis they are trying to apply or the appropriateness. I have been a witness to witless.
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When there's a beneficial environmental change, the need to evolve a better survival strategy is reduced. Populations grow nilly willy, basically. That can literally lead to WEAKER species, since they become very dependent on the bounty of the environment to survive. We see this all the time in niche species dying off in tiny and shrinking ecosystems that don't exist anywhere else.
When there's a harsher environment, the weak die off. Environmental pressures would encourage even stronger species to evolve, and that would include those who naturally have more resistance to what kills them proliferating while their less hearty fellows fall.
So, no, the bounty won't breed hearty individual. It's always the harder environments that do that.
And we have set off the bomb that will make the environment the hardest it's been in millions of years.
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I admit to having occupied both those positions at various points in my career.
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Science and stats do fine together. The problem is when non-scientists claim a field to be science and they will heavily misuse stats to push agendas.
Political science and social sciences are 2 of the worst.
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