Superbugs could kill 10 million people a year

CBS News: Warnings about the dangers of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" are taking on new urgency with the release of a frightening new report from the British government. The report says higher rates of drug-resistant bacterial infections could result in 10 million deaths a year by 2050. The report puts the financial toll at a potential $100 trillion.

"That's a tremendous impact," CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus told "CBS This Morning." And the problem is not just hypothetical. "It's a real threat today. It's going to be a bigger threat," he said.

Superbugs such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly called MRSA, are currently blamed for about 23,000 deaths a year in the United States. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization warned that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria have now spread worldwide and could lead to a "post-antibiotic era in which common infections and minor injuries...can once again kill." The WHO report called the problem "so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine."

The risk has grown in recent years as the overuse of common antibiotics encouraged growth of drug-resistant strains. "Every time somebody has a fever, a doctor can give them an antibiotic. We have to stop that," Agus said. Antibiotics don't work against viral infections like a cold or the flu, but patients often ask for the drugs anyway, and too often doctors comply...

Colorized transmission electron micrograph showing USA 300 strain of Staphlococcus aureus, shown in gold, outside a white blood cell, shown in blue. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). From the National Institutes of Health

New method for quickly determining antibiotic resistance

A press release from Uppsala University: Scientists from Uppsala University, the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm and Uppsala University Hospital have developed a new method of rapidly identifying which bacteria are causing an infection and determining whether they are resistant or sensitive to antibiotics. The findings are now being published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

‘Clinical use of the method would mean that the right antibiotic treatment could be started straightaway, reducing unnecessary use of antibiotics,’ says Professor Dan I. Andersson of Uppsala University, who headed the study jointly with Professor Mats Nilsson of SciLifeLab in Stockholm and Stockholm University.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing medical problem that threatens human health all
over the world. Today, many people are dying because of infections caused by resistant bacteria. When an infected person is treated with antibiotics, ‘empirical therapy’ is usually provided. This means that the choice of antibiotic is based on the resistance situation of the bacteria in a large population (such as the Swedish population), rather than on the resistance, if any, of the bacteria in the infected person’s body. The result is sometimes selection of an antibiotic drug that is ineffective against the bacteria concerned, because the latter is resistant to the drug chosen. This, in turn, boosts the use of antibiotics, especially what are known as ‘broad-spectrum’ antibiotics that work on many types of bacteria. One possible solution to these problems would be for us to have reliable methods of quickly and easily identifying the bacterial species causing the infection and its resistance pattern, and apply the correct treatment immediately.

Professor Andersson continues: ‘This is just what we’ve been working on in our study. We have developed a new method that permits identification of both the species and the resistance pattern of bacteria in urinary infections in less than four hours. By comparison, the resistance determination done at present takes one to two days.’...

Agar plate with colonies, image from NOAA

Environmental change triggers rapid evolution

University of Leeds Research and Innovation News: A University of Leeds-led study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, overturns the common assumption that evolution only occurs gradually over hundreds or thousands of years.

Instead, researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations, leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large changes in population size. The results have important implications in areas such as disease and pest control, conservation and fisheries management because they demonstrate that evolution can be a game-changer even in the short-term.

Professor Tim Benton, of the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, said:  “This demonstrates that short-term ecological change and evolution are completely intertwined and cannot reasonably be considered separate. We found that populations evolve rapidly in response to environmental change and population management. This can have major consequences such as reducing harvesting yields or saving a population heading for extinction.”

Although previous research has implied a link between short-term changes in animal species’ physical characteristics and evolution, the Leeds-led study is the first to prove a causal relationship between rapid genetic evolution and animal population dynamics in a controlled experimental setting.

The researchers worked with soil mites that were collected from the wild and then raised in 18 glass tubes. Forty percent of adult mites were removed every week from six of the glass tubes. A similar proportion of juveniles were removed each week in a further six tubes, while no “harvesting” was conducted in the remaining third of the tubes.

Lead author Dr Tom Cameron, a postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Leeds at the time of the research and now based in Umeå University, Sweden, said: “We saw significant evolutionary changes relatively quickly. The age of maturity of the mites in the tubes doubled over about 15 generations, because they were competing in a different way than they would in the wild. Removing the adults caused them to remain as juveniles even longer because the genetics were responding to the high chance that they were going to die as soon as they matured. When they did eventually mature, they were so enormous they could lay all of their eggs very quickly.”...

A giant red velvet mite, shot by Ton Rulkens, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Tennessee enacts evolution, climate change law; America is doomed

Neela Banerjee in the Los Angeles Times: Tennessee enacted a law Tuesday that critics contend allows public school teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the controversial measure to become law without his signature and, in a statement, expressed misgivings about it. Nevertheless, he ignored pleas from educators, parents and civil libertarians to veto the bill.

The law does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change and "the chemical origins of life." Instead, it aims to prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses to those topics.

...The bill's critics, which include the Tennessee Science Teachers Assn. and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, counter that teachers currently have no problem addressing unconventional ideas and challenges that students bring up. They argue, instead, that the measure gives legal cover to teachers to introduce pseudoscientific ideas.

...The law is likely to stoke growing concerns among teachers around the country that teaching climate science is becoming the same kind of classroom and community flash point as evolution. Tennessee is now the second state, after Louisiana, to allow the teaching of alternatives to accepted science on climate change....

John T. Scopes, shortly before the infamous 1925 Monkey Trial, in which he was found guilty of teaching evolution in a classroom, the brute

US teachers offered support for climate change lessons

Suzanne Goldenburg in the Guardian (UK) writes about some welcome help in resisting the onslaught of climate ignorance in the US: An organisation that has championed the teaching of evolution in America's schools is offering support to teachers who have come under attack for lessons on climate change.

The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE), which has worked for 30 years to keep evolution in the classroom, said it will begin offering teachers advice on how to deal with students, parents, and even school authorities demanding they drop classes on climate change. "We have been getting anecdotal reports for a couple of years now of teachers getting hammered for teaching climate science – just like they did for teaching evolution," said Eugenie Scott, director of the centre.

The new initiative launches on 16 January – in the throes of a Republican primary contest in which candidates have fallen over each other to discredit climate change, or the link to human activity. Until now, the campaign against climate science has been conducted mainly at the university level. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, is pursuing the climate scientist Michael Mann through the courts, to gain access to his email and other work documents.

...In the last two years, however, the NCSE has registered a crossover effect, with opponents of evolution also taking on climate science. "Evolution is still the big one, but climate change is catching up," Roberta Johnson, director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (Nesta), told Science earlier this year...

This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The original "Human_evolution_scheme.png" was made by José-Manuel Benitos. The following was stated by the original author: "Simplified scheme of human evolution, it does not try to be trustworthy, but a symbol of this process". This version by M. Garde, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

British butterfly is evolving to respond to climate change

University of Bristol: As global temperatures rise and climatic zones move polewards, species will need to find different environments to prevent extinction. New research, published today in the journal Molecular Ecology, has revealed that climate change is causing certain species to move and adapt to a range of new habitats. The study, led by academics at the Universities of Bristol and Sheffield, aimed to understand the role of evolution in helping a species to successfully track ongoing climate change.

With climate warming many species are moving further north in the UK, however, this may mean crossing a landscape with increasingly less of their preferred habitat. Evolutionary change in the ability to use geographically widespread habitats or increased ability to move longer distances can help species to track the warming climate and move northwards.

The Brown Argus butterfly is successfully expanding its distribution northwards in the UK and uses a range of distinct habitats. Using genetic techniques to detect evolutionary change, the researchers were able to show that the colonisation of new sites further north by the Brown Argus has involved significant adaptation during or following colonisation.

Furthermore, the results suggest that populations of the Brown Argus are adapted to different habitats and that pre-existing variation in habitat preference between populations has been important in allowing the colonisation of new habitats....

A Brown Argus butterfly, shot by Rosenzweig, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Genetic study on mosquitos shows climate change adaptation

Softpedia: Over the past couple of decades, global warming has made its presence felt more and more, and species have been forced to adapt under this influence. The evolution has now been proven by a genetic study of mosquitoes. Researchers at the University of Oregon investigated the fine-scale genetic structure of Wyeomyia smithii, which is a type of pitcher plant mosquito. The analysis revealed that this species is indeed evolving right now, as an adaptation to the rapid climate change that is affecting Earth as we speak.

Global warming shifts weather patterns, influences precipitations and drought events, raises sea levels, and generally makes the world a hotter place. Plants are growing smaller each year, while the ocean becomes increasingly acidic, and all of this is caused by our massive greenhouse gas emission levels.

Using Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD), a high-throughput sequencing technique, the team managed to discover that these changes in the environment are affecting W. smithii as well. Details of their investigation appear in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“This project demonstrates the power of genomics technologies, which can provide new knowledge about the vast array of Earth's species,” explains expert Sam Scheiner…..

Time for your close-up, Wyeomyia smithii. Shot by Rkitko, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Weed resistance could mean herbicide is futile

Bob Holmes in New Scientist: The world's most popular herbicide is losing its knockout punch. More and more weeds are evolving resistance to glyphosate - originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup - but the problem could have been forestalled by farming practices enriched by a better understanding of evolution. This is a serious problem. "Glyphosate is as important to world food production as penicillin is to human health," says Stephen Powles, a plant scientist at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

In 1996, Monsanto began selling crop varieties genetically modified to contain a gene for glyphosate resistance. This enabled farmers to spray glyphosate - lethal to plants yet non-toxic to animals - on their fields to kill weeds without damaging the crops, even during the growing season.

Today nearly 100 million hectares worldwide are planted with glyphosate-resistant crops. In much of the south-eastern US, as well as Brazil and Argentina, farmers grow glyphosate-resistant corn, soybeans and cotton year after year and have come to rely almost exclusively on this herbicide. This has encouraged at least nine species of weed to evolve their own glyphosate resistance, to the point where some farmers can no longer control weed infestations.

The solution, as any evolutionary biologist will tell you, is for farmers to vary weed-control practices so that weeds face a number of evolutionary pressures instead of just one. Monsanto recommends precisely this in its instructions to farmers. But farmers have been reluctant to reduce their use of an effective herbicide for an intangible future benefit, especially when few have experienced glyphosate-resistant weeds….

Backlit spring weeds, shot by Downtowngal, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate change influences the size of marine organisms: Big advantage for the small

Science Daily: The ice is melting, the sea level is rising and species are conquering new habitats. The warming of the world climate has many consequences. Researchers now report that climate change influences the size of aquatic organisms.

For a long time scientists have observed the biological consequences of global climate change. One of the most famous symptoms is the shift of habitats from the equator further north or further south. More recent studies show that not only the habitats but also the size of organisms is affected.

Dr. Martin Daufresne of the HYAX Lake Ecosystem Laboratory in Aix-en-Provence, France, as well as Prof. Ulrich Sommer and Dr. Kathrin Lengfellner of the Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel have shown that global warming leads to reduced body size of organisms in the ocean and in freshwater. Very different organisms showed this tendency: bacteria, plankton-algae, zooplankton and fishes in the North and Baltic Sea and in French rivers.

Three mechanisms seem to play a role in this process.

• First: The proportion of smaller species grows.
• Second: The proportion of smaller individuals grows within one species.
• Third: The animals reach sexual maturity with smaller body size.

“This development affects the functioning of the whole eco-system: The body size is decisive for what animals can eat and by whom they are eaten. A shift to smaller species and individuals within the fish population could lead to a reduction of zooplankton because small fish will eat less fish and more zooplankton. This could pave the way fvor massive and unpleasant algal blooms. Furthermore, with smaller fish the economic value of fishery declines”, explains Prof. Sommer….

A drastic change in phytoplankton: On the left, a microscopic photo of the spring bloom under current environmental conditions, with large diatoms are dominating. With a warming of six degrees (right picture) much smaller flagellates are far more numerous. (Credit: IFM-GEOMAR)

Galapagos face ecological disaster due to tourist trips: study

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Mosquitoes brought into the Galapagos on tourist planes and boats threaten to wreak "ecological disaster" in the islands, central to Darwin's theory of evolution, a study said Wednesday. The insects can spread potentially lethal diseases in the archipelago off Ecuador's Pacific coast, used by Charles Darwin as the basis of his seminal work "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection".

"Few tourists realise the irony that their trip to Galapagos may actually increase the risk of an ecological disaster," said Simon Goodman of Leeds University, one of the study's co-authors. "That we haven't already seen serious disease impacts in Galapagos is probably just a matter of luck."

The study found that the southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus, was regularly hitching rides on planes from the South American mainland, and island-hopping on tourist boats between the different islands….

Darwin's finches or Galapagos finches. Darwin, 1845. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. 2d edition.

Could climate change worsen Lyme disease?

Science Daily: In a finding that suggests how global warming could impact infectious disease, scientists from Yale University, in collaboration with other institutions, have determined that climate impacts the severity of Lyme Disease by influencing the feeding patterns of deer ticks that carry and transmit it.

Deer ticks live for two years and have three stages of life – larval, nymphal and adult. They obtain one blood meal during each stage in order to survive. If the source of the first meal (a mouse, bird or other small animal) is infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, the tick also becomes infected and passes it on to its next meal source – be it wildlife or human – in its second life stage as a nymph.

But, as the Yale team demonstrates, it’s the seasonal cycle of feeding for each stage of the tick’s life that determines the severity of infection in a given region. The researchers found that this cycle is heavily influenced by climate. In the moderate climate of the Northeastern United States, larval deer ticks feed in the late summer, long after the spring feeding of infected nymphs. This long gap between feeding times directly correlates to more cases of Lyme Disease reported in the Northeast, say the scientists.

“When there is a longer gap, the most persistent infections are more likely to survive,” explains Durland Fish, Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and corresponding author of the study. “These persistent bacterial strains cause more severe disease in humans, leading more people to seek medical attention and resulting in more case reports.”

But in the Midwest, where there are greater extremes of temperature, there is a shorter window of opportunity for tick feeding, and therefore a shorter gap between nymphal and larval feedings. Because of this, report the scientists, Midwestern wildlife and ticks are infected with less persistent strains, which correlates with fewer cases of Lyme Disease reported in the Midwest.

The clear implication of this research, say the researchers, is that, as the planet warms, the Upper Midwest could find itself in the same situation as the Northeast: longer gaps between nymphal and larval feeding, and therefore, stronger, more persistent strains of Lyme Disease….

Size comparison of a tick and the head of a match, shot by André Karwath aka Aka, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

What would Darwin have made of climate change?

Science Daily: Charles Darwin may have been born 200 years ago come Feb. 12, but his theory of evolution remains an everyday touchstone for modern biologists. And while the Origin of Species author might not have known the term “global warming,” he wouldn’t have been surprised that the environment is changing. He would, however, be astonished by the speed at which it’s happening today, researchers believe.

“Every species is under temporary permanence,” says Bill Saidel, an associate professor of biology at Rutgers University’s Camden Campus, where he teaches Animal Behavior and Behavioral Neurobiology. Darwin would have predicted changes in species’ habits and even changes in the environment, but the planet’s facing changes that are both drastic and unpredictable.

Saidel notes some already observed results of global warming today, like changing avian migration patterns and pH levels in oceans. But how would Darwin begin to determine how every species might respond to climate change? Most likely he’d begin by observing those habitats that are uniquely individual and well-defined.

This approach – researching one specialized habitat for insight into a larger understanding of evolution – is how Saidel conducts his own research at Rutgers–Camden. His interest in the exotic African butterfly fish is precisely because it has evolved two retinas in each eye, but only feeds from information derived from one. The fish’s highly specialized adaptations, from retina to brain, serve as a model for discerning the circuitry of feeding in all vertebrae whose visual traits aren’t as clearly segmented.

“This fish has much to teach us. It has adapted extraordinarily to a single unique environment. Yet, the consequences of a highly adapted species is that any change can be dire,” says Saidel.

…The issue of time is crucial to understanding the implications of global warming. Shain calls it “accelerated evolution” and predicts large-scale extinctions that even Darwin couldn’t comprehend. Species that can best adapt to this abrupt change will go on and multiply, leaving the world with less of a variety. “We lose diversity with a rapid change, but always life finds a way. Some kind of life will fill the gap.”

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in his later years. Photo by J. Cameron, 1869