More squint-inducing science reporting on CBC. What else is new?
So I ran across an article today: Toronto water has drug-resistant bacteria, and promptly clicked on it because it is Relevant To My Interests.
The gist is that a lab at Michigan has been filtering tap water samples and growing the captured bacteria on antibiotics to see if they get resistant colonies. They found some, in US samples and in the Toronto samples that CBC provided. They did not identify the isolates.
Um, duh? First of all, it seems surprising to some people in the CBC comments that tap water is not sterile. Even if the treatment method got rid of all bugs, the water is still going to travel through miles of underground plumbing and up through a tap that probably hasn't seen bleach in a decade into an non-sterile container that some CBC intern probably had their sticky hands all over.
But most bacteria in the environment are not the kinds that cause human disease, so the water is safe to drink, the researchers said.
The real concern is the genetic pollution created by antibiotic-resistant genes circulating in the environment and the risk that human pathogens will pick up those resistant genes.
That's not news. We knew about horizontal transfer and genetic competence a long time ago (for values of 'we' that are people who've taken a second-year microbiology course). Absolutely environmental bacteria swap resistance, to each other and to pathogens. But why is the bacterial content of the tapwater of more concern than, say, the naturally resistant commensals living on my hands?
That's not even the first place the CBC commenter hivemind goes (despite the fact that it's in the article contents -- why pay attention to what you're reading?). Instead, they latch on to the unrelated closing line:
To learn more about resistance in general, public health experts are studying the use of antibiotics in agriculture and medicine.
Yes. Yes they are. And that has what to do with the unidentified resistant bacteria in the tap water? Based on the article comments, the first things people think of is Hygiene Hypothesis and overuse of antibiotics and, IDEK, freaking alcohol hand-wash (which is a whole separate thing. *despairs* Triclosan =/= ethanol.)
Leaving out user contamination by Random CBC Intern With No Background In Aseptic Technique, there is no way water gets through all that possibly decades-old pipe without picking up, among other things, some soil bacteria or spores on the way -- Acinetobacter, Bacillus, Streptomyces spp., other Actinobacteria, suchwhat -- which are major antibiotic producers and therefore have a lot of native resistance to the chemicals they and their neighbours produce themselves. Native resistance. Meaning that without identifying and genotyping these isolates we have no idea where the resistance came from.
There is no evidence based on this one (incomplete[ly reported]) test that the numbers of resistant bacteria in the potable water of Toronto is higher than some undefined baseline, occurring in unexpected species, OR due to artificial selection pressure from some undetermined, possibly imaginary antibiotic contamination. Some bacteria are drug-resistant! You can't change it. So why are we freaking Joe Public out by telling him he has ~*~drug-resistant bacteria~*~ in his Kleen Kanteen?
Get up in there with some API strips, show me the species and then we can speculate about what the deal is.
P.S. The only way you're going to get sterile tap water is if you personally autoclave it.
In conclusion, CBC does not report science/health news in the rigorous fashion I have come to expect from undergraduate lab reports or things I read on the department bulletin board. :P Also the commenter hivemind does not know bacterial genetics from a kick in the head.
The gist is that a lab at Michigan has been filtering tap water samples and growing the captured bacteria on antibiotics to see if they get resistant colonies. They found some, in US samples and in the Toronto samples that CBC provided. They did not identify the isolates.
Um, duh? First of all, it seems surprising to some people in the CBC comments that tap water is not sterile. Even if the treatment method got rid of all bugs, the water is still going to travel through miles of underground plumbing and up through a tap that probably hasn't seen bleach in a decade into an non-sterile container that some CBC intern probably had their sticky hands all over.
But most bacteria in the environment are not the kinds that cause human disease, so the water is safe to drink, the researchers said.
The real concern is the genetic pollution created by antibiotic-resistant genes circulating in the environment and the risk that human pathogens will pick up those resistant genes.
That's not news. We knew about horizontal transfer and genetic competence a long time ago (for values of 'we' that are people who've taken a second-year microbiology course). Absolutely environmental bacteria swap resistance, to each other and to pathogens. But why is the bacterial content of the tapwater of more concern than, say, the naturally resistant commensals living on my hands?
That's not even the first place the CBC commenter hivemind goes (despite the fact that it's in the article contents -- why pay attention to what you're reading?). Instead, they latch on to the unrelated closing line:
To learn more about resistance in general, public health experts are studying the use of antibiotics in agriculture and medicine.
Yes. Yes they are. And that has what to do with the unidentified resistant bacteria in the tap water? Based on the article comments, the first things people think of is Hygiene Hypothesis and overuse of antibiotics and, IDEK, freaking alcohol hand-wash (which is a whole separate thing. *despairs* Triclosan =/= ethanol.)
Leaving out user contamination by Random CBC Intern With No Background In Aseptic Technique, there is no way water gets through all that possibly decades-old pipe without picking up, among other things, some soil bacteria or spores on the way -- Acinetobacter, Bacillus, Streptomyces spp., other Actinobacteria, suchwhat -- which are major antibiotic producers and therefore have a lot of native resistance to the chemicals they and their neighbours produce themselves. Native resistance. Meaning that without identifying and genotyping these isolates we have no idea where the resistance came from.
There is no evidence based on this one (incomplete[ly reported]) test that the numbers of resistant bacteria in the potable water of Toronto is higher than some undefined baseline, occurring in unexpected species, OR due to artificial selection pressure from some undetermined, possibly imaginary antibiotic contamination. Some bacteria are drug-resistant! You can't change it. So why are we freaking Joe Public out by telling him he has ~*~drug-resistant bacteria~*~ in his Kleen Kanteen?
Get up in there with some API strips, show me the species and then we can speculate about what the deal is.
P.S. The only way you're going to get sterile tap water is if you personally autoclave it.
In conclusion, CBC does not report science/health news in the rigorous fashion I have come to expect from undergraduate lab reports or things I read on the department bulletin board. :P Also the commenter hivemind does not know bacterial genetics from a kick in the head.