Rice a source of super-bugs

While antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases like Golden Staph cause thousands of serious hospital infections every year, new research suggests the next super-bug could develop and disperse via a much more common source – rice.

Professor Hatch Stokes and Associate Professor Michael Gillings of Macquarie University, together with colleagues in Denmark and Canada, published their research findings in the international Journal of Bacteriology.

The team found Class 1 integrons on four different bacterial species they had recovered from forest soil and lake sediment in three separate locations in Sydney.

Class 1 integrons are genetic elements that capture genes and recombine them in their bacterial host, and which in clinical settings are a major contributor to the problem of multi-drug-resistant diseases. Because the rapid appearance of Class 1 integrons coincided with the beginnings of the antibiotic era 60 years ago, it was widely believed up till now that they came about because of widespread antibiotic use.

Stokes believes the prevalence of Class 1 integrons in the environment away from human interaction is a major concern for the future.

“The presence of Class 1 integrons in bacteria intimately associated with a crop production plant consumed worldwide arguably creates a major conduit for the frequent influx of new mobile resistance genes into bacteria in close association with humans and other animals at a scale not previously appreciated,” he says.