Several strains of bacteria in the soil can make a meal of the world's most potent antibiotics, researchers said on Thursday, in a startling finding that illustrates the extent to which these germ-fighting drugs are losing the war against superbugs.
A study of soil microbes taken from 11 sites uncovered bacteria that could withstand antibiotics 50 times stronger than the standard for bacterial resistance.
"It certainly was very surprising to us," said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, whose research appears in the journal Science.
"Many bacteria in many different soil isolates can not only tolerate antibiotics, they can actually live on them as their sole source of nutrition," Church said in an audio interview on the journal's Web site.
Scary. More.
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