9/16/2016

Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds, other wildlife Environmental Health News

Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds,

other wildlife
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Lindsey Konkel/EHN

By Lindsey Konkel
Sta Writer
Environmental Health News

November 5, 2013
WORCESTER, Mass. One afternoon last winter, Julie Ellis unfurled a long, white tarp under a stand of trees near
Coes Pond where hundreds of crows roost. Her mission: to collect as much bird poop as possible.
Back in the laboratory, Ellis colleagues combed through the feces. Testing its bacteria, they discovered
something unusual genes that make the crows resistant to antibiotics.
Drug-resistant
(http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/)
infections are a fast-growing threat to human health, due
largely to overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and
livestock production, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. At least 2 million people
each year in the United States alone are sickened by
infections resistant to drugs.
Now new research, including the crow poop study
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23919480)
conducted in four states, provides evidence that
antibiotic resistance has spread beyond hospitals and
farms to wildlife.
Weve documented humanderived drug resistance where it
shouldnt be in wildlife and the
environment. But we know very
little about how this may impact
public health.Julie Ellis, Tufts
University

Some experts
worry that
contaminating
wildlife with
such genes
may hasten the

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Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds, other wildlife Environmental Health News

spread of drug resistance. Nevertheless, the

consequences for human health remain poorly
understood.
Weve documented human-derived drug resistance
where it shouldnt be in wildlife and the environment.
But we know very little about how this may impact public
health. There just isnt that smoking gun, said Ellis, a
research scientist at Tufts Universitys veterinary school.
In addition to crows, resistance genes have been
detected in the bacteria of gulls, houseies

Brad Smith/ickr

(http://www.ickr.com/photos/57402879@N00/104343503/)

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1489584/), moths
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19206998), foxes (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22448723), frogs,
sharks (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20722248) and whales
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19187217), as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California
and Washington.
The spread to wildlife is an indicator of the wide-reaching scale of the problem. Microbes connect the planet,
said Lance Price, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University.
The danger is that we enter a post-antibiotic era in which even our last-line drugs wont work and routine
infections become life-threatening, he said.
While antibiotics have revolutionized medicine in less than 100 years, antibiotic-producing bacteria have existed
in nature for millions of years. Natural antibiotics likely evolved as weapons in a biological arms race between
competing bacteria.
But the environmental drug resistance that Ellis and others are now seeing is dierent its manmade.
What has changed is that weve placed great selective pressure on bacteria with our use of antibiotics, said
Ludek Zurek, a microbiologist at Kansas State University who participated in the crow study.
Bacteria can swap genes with one another, so those that
survive can pass along the genetic equipment to withstand
an antibiotic assault to unrelated bacterial strains,
spreading resistance across the globe, microbe by
microbe.
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Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds, other wildlife Environmental Health News

The danger is that we enter a

Those bacteria
post-antibiotic era in which
that pick up
even our last-line drugs wont
resistance genes
work and routine infections
survive better in
become life-threatening.
an environment
Lance Price, George
where antibiotics
Washington University
are being used.
They can outcompete all the other bacteria, said Price,
who advocates against the use of antibiotics in livestock.
In the crow research, scientists collected nearly 600 fecal
samples in four states Massachusetts, Kansas, New York
and California. Fifteen of the crows sampled, about 2.5
percent, harbored genes for resistance to vancomycin, a
drug of last resort for hard-to-treat hospital-acquired
infections. Crows with the resistance genes in their feces
were found in all of the states except California.

Julie Ellis

The vancomycin resistance gene is rare [in environmental

samples], so the fact that they readily found it in crows is
signicant, said Amy Pruden, an environmental engineer at
Virginia Tech who studies antibiotic resistance genes as
emerging contaminants in water bodies.

Whats alarming, say the researchers, is that some of the vancomycin-resistant bacteria in the crows were
resistant to several other antibiotics widely used in human medicine and livestock feed.
Its very dicult to trace the resistance back to a source.
Because birds are so mobile, its possible they may acquire resistance genes from multiple sources in their
travels, said Ellis. Maybe they visit a dumpster or sewage treatment plant one day and later a farmers eld.
The source of antibiotic-resistance cannot always
be determined because many drugs are used both
in human and animal medicine. However, the
vancomycin resistance in the wild crows bears the
signature of a human clinical source, the study
authors concluded.
They speculate that waste sites may be a
potential source of the crows bacteria.
Traditional wastewater treatment approaches
may not destroy genetic material, Pruden said.
Much of the research on drug resistance has
focused on hospitals and healthcare settings. The
CDC estimates that 50 percent of all antibiotics
prescribed to people are not needed.

NIAID

(http://www.ickr.com/photos/niaid/5926644293/)

More recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the environment as a source of drug resistance.
Many more tons of antibiotics are used in U.S. livestock production to prevent and treat disease and to promote
growth than in human medicine. An estimated 30,000 tons of antibiotics each year are sold for use in foodhttp://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2013/wildlife-antibiotic-resistance

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Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds, other wildlife Environmental Health News

producing animals. People who consume these foods can develop antibiotic-resistant infections, according to a
CDC report (http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/) issued in September.
Its unclear what role, if any, crows and other wild animals may play in hastening the spread of these infections or
creating new ones.
Wildlife may be an important piece of the puzzle, Pruden said. Its certainly an area that warrants more
research.

Pauli Hayes/EHN

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)

The above work, by Environmental Health News (../EHN.org), is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
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Flying the coop: Antibiotic resistance spreads to birds, other wildlife Environmental Health News

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