Here's the latest news on this topic - Salmonella has become immune to antibiotics.
“We have shown that there are a large number of Salmonella strains that are resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics in both food and the human body. All this suggests that the risk of epidemics caused by contaminated food is very high for Brazil today,”said Fernanda Almeida from the University of São Paulo (Brazil).
In recent years, the problem of the emergence of so-called "superbugs" - microbes that are resistant to the action of one or more antibiotics, has become more and more acute for physicians. Among them are both rare infectious agents and very common and dangerous pathogens, such as Staphylococcus aureus (Staphilococcus aureus) or pneumococcus (Klebsiella pneumoniae). There is a real danger that all antibiotics will lose their effectiveness and medicine will return to the "dark ages".
The main "incubators" of such microbes, according to scientists today, are hospitals and livestock farms, where antibiotics are used to accelerate the growth of beef cattle. Both on farms and in hospitals, there are large numbers of potential carriers of the infection, both bacteria themselves and antibiotics, forcing them to evolve and preventing "ordinary" bacteria from driving out less prolific super microbes.
In recent years, in virtually all countries of the world, there have been constant scandals associated with the import or production of beef or other types of meat containing large quantities of dangerous pathogenic microbes, including Salmonella enterica.
Almeida and her colleagues found that more than half of Salmonella strains became immune to one or even more classes of antibiotics by decoding the genomes of 90 varieties of the microbe that caused outbreaks of diarrhea and fever on farms or among people in Brazil from 1982 to 2013.
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As shown by this analysis, these microbes managed to develop during this time four dozen genes at once that protect them from one specific or several antibiotics at once. They acquired some of these genes on their own, while others, as indicated by the similarity of their structure with fragments of pneumococcus DNA, they could "borrow" from other dangerous bacteria.
At the current time, more than half of the Brazilian Salmonella strains have become immune to the action of sulfonamides and streptomycin. About a third of them do not respond to tetracycline and gentamicin, and another 7% have begun to resist the action of cephalosporins, "antibiotics of last resort."
Interestingly, in recent decades, most new infections are caused not by these "superbugs" from the Typhimurium family, but by another type of Salmonella, belonging to the Enteritidis type, which entered Brazil from Europe in the late 1990s.
With what this is connected, scientists do not yet know. At the same time, they emphasize that invulnerable Salmonella can return at any time and cause an outbreak of infection, the fight against which will be extremely difficult.
