Antibiotic resistance happens when certain bacteria change in response to the use of drugs. One of the biggest threats to global health today, resistance is directly associated with the overuse and misuse of available drugs.
Although the resistance mechanism is already widely known by the scientific community, an international research group has found evidence that a type of resistant bacteria – popularly called superbugs – may have appeared in nature long before the use of antibiotics in humans and animals.
In the study, published in the scientific journal Nature, the researchers revealed that specific strains of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus antibiotic-resistant methicillin appeared in hedgehogs in Europe in the pre-antibiotic era. According to the article, these strains spread within local populations of hedgehogs and secondary hosts, including cattle and humans.
How did the process of resistance in nature take place
Hedgehogs can live with fungi of the species Trichophyton erinacei and with the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus on your skin.
The researchers found that, for the sake of survival, these fungi naturally produce antibiotics in order to kill the bacteria. From continuous exposure to these substances, the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus developed resistance mechanisms.
A Staphylococcus aureus Methicillin-resistant is known among the scientific community as the MRSA superbug. MRSA was first identified in 1960, shortly after the introduction of methicillin as a treatment option against Staphylococcus aureus resistant to penicillin.
“The discovery that mecC-MRSA samples [tipo de Staphylococcus aureus] isolated in humans likely originate from local hedgehog reservoirs indicates that mecC-MRSA has been a cause of sporadic infections in humans for the past 200 years, more than a century before MRSA was first identified in patients in the 1960s″, he says the article.
The analysis included 828 nasal area, skin and foot samples from 276 hedgehogs from 16 wildlife rescue centers in ten European countries and two in New Zealand. “Together, these results suggest that methicillin resistance emerged in the pre-antibiotic era as a co-evolutionary adaptation of S. aureus colonization of hedgehogs infected by dermatophytes”, says the study.
According to the research, the evolution of clinically relevant antibiotic resistance genes in wild animals and the connectivity of natural, agricultural and human ecosystems reinforce the need for the One Health approach to understanding and managing antibiotic resistance .
The concept of One Health includes approaches aimed at caring for human, animals and the environment, together, as a public health strategy.
Reference: CNN Brasil
