Phage spread antibiotic resistance

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/asfm-psa051515.php

Public Release: 15-May-2015
American Society for Microbiology

Investigators found that nearly half of the 50 chicken meat samples purchased from supermarkets, street markets, and butchers in Austria contained viruses that are capable of transferring antibiotic resistance genes from one bacterium to another--or from one species to another. "Our work suggests that such transfer could spread antibiotic resistance in environments such as food production units and hospitals and clinics," said corresponding author Friederike Hilbert, DVM. The research is published ahead of print May 1, in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

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Until recently, transduction of antibiotic resistance via phage was assumed to be a very minor source of the spread of resistance, said Hilbert. "New information from the sequencing of bacterial DNA has shown that transduction must be a driving force in bacterial evolution, and thus, quite common."

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Unlike bacteria, which are true living creatures, viruses, including phages, can be thought of more as complex molecular machinery. As such, the latter are much more resistant to disinfectants, including those used in the food industry. Alcohol, in particular, is harmless to most viruses. "It is thus highly likely that phages survive under routine conditions of disinfection, not only in the food industry," Hilbert writes.

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