Study shows bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics

CHICAGO A new study shows that soil microbes have become resistant to even the world’s most potent antibiotics.

According to published reports, the study extracted soil microbes—taken from 11 sites—that were able to withstand antibiotics 50 times more than the normal standard for bacterial resistance.

The research was conducted by George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, whose initial plan was to find organisms in the soil that were able to remove toxins from cellulose. According to published reports, the soil organisms easily defeated the toxins of the cellulose, which gives plants their structure, but when tested against antibiotics they found that the microbes actually grew on almost all of the antibiotics.

According to published reports, the antibiotics used in the study were penicillin and ciproflaxin, which are very well known and used often. Although the bacteria were of a type not dangerous to humans, it had properties very close to groups of bacteria that infect people with cystic fibrosis and Serratia marceescens, which causes blood infections.

The study confirms that throughout the years, bacteria have increasingly grown more and more resistant to antibiotics, which serves as a growing concern for geneticists.