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DNA POLLUTION MAY BE SPAWNING KILLER MICROBES
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DNA POLLUTION MAY BE SPAWNING KILLER MICROBES
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DNA POLLUTION MAY BE SPAWNING KILLER MICROBES
2008
Overview
An even more direct conduit into the environment may be the common practice of irrigating fields with wastewater from livestock lagoons. About three years ago, David Graham, a University of Kansas environmental engineer, was puzzled in the fall by a dramatic spike in resistance genes in a pond on a Kansas feedlot he was studying. \"We didn't know what was going on until I talked with a large-animal researcher,\" he recalls. At the end of the summer, feedlots receive newly weaned calves from outlying ranches. To prevent the young animals from importing infections, the feedlot operators were giving them five-day \"shock doses\" of antibiotics. \"Their attitude had been, cows are big animals, they're pretty tough, so you give them 10 times what they need,\" Graham says. Every tested strain in a dirt sample proved resistant to multiple antibiotics. Most treatment plants, [Scott Weber] explains, gorge a relatively small number of sludge bacteria with all the liquid waste they can eat. The result, he found, is a spike in antibiotic-resistant organisms. \"We don't know exactly why,\" he says, \"but our findings have raised an even more important question.\" Is the jump in resistance genes coming from a population explosion in the resistant enteric, or intestinal, bacteria coming into the sewage plant? Or is it coming from sewage-digesting sludge bacteria that are taking up the genes from incoming bacteria? The answer is important because sludge bacteria are much more likely to thrive and spread their resistance genes once the sludge is discharged into rivers (in treated wastewater) and onto crop fields (as slurried fertilizer). For consumer antibacterial soaps the solution is simple, [Rolf Halden] says: \"Eliminate them. There's no reason to have these chemicals in consumer products.\" Studies show that household products containing such anti- bacterials don't prevent the spread of sickness any better than ordinary soap and water. \"If there's no benefit, then all we're left with is the risk,\" Halden says. He notes that many European retailers have already pulled these products from their shelves. \"I think it's only a matter of time before they are removed from U.S. shelves as well.\"
