Karen Hopkin is a scientist. My name is Karen Hopkin.
There are a lot of animals. They are covered in feathers. Some people think they're cute. A new study says that they are the origin of resistance to methicillin. There is an observation in the journal Nature.
Antibiotic resistance is a big issue. M-R-S-A or MRSA can be difficult to treat due to the fact that many have developed resistance to a few of our frontline therapies.
It has been assumed for a long time that resistance in disease-causingbacteria, including Staph aureus, is a modern phenomenon driven by clinical use of antibiotics.
There is a senior scientist at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen.
The CDC is an agency in the US.
The first methicillin- resistant bugs were isolated from British hospitals a year after the drug became available for clinical use.
A couple of years ago, we found out that MecC M-R-S-A is present in more than 60 percent of hedgehogs from the two Nordic countries.
What is MecC M-R-S-A? There is a family of antibiotics called the "beta lactam" family. They kill bugs by disrupting their metabolisms. The MecC and MecA genes code for different versions of the enzymes that the antibiotics don't like.
The Staph aureusbacteria are resistant to most antibiotics.
Hopkin wondered where the resistance genes came from. They have been seen in people with Staph infections and in animals. In Sweden, I found that mecC is very common.
Why do hedgehogs carry so much mecC MRSA?
He went to the library to find out.
There is a study from the 1960s that shows that a particular fungus in hedgehogs can make a penicillin-like antibiotic.
The skin fungus would expose the hedgehogs to penicillin. That could have led to an evolutionary arms race.
This was a real eureka moment and led us to theorize that the mecC MRSA that was found in the wild had been there for a long time.
In order to confirm the suspicion, Larsen and his colleagues screened for mecC MRSA in hedgehogs from Europe and New Zealand. The genes needed to make penicillin were found in the fungus carried by the hedgehogs.
The genomes of around one thousand mecC MRSA isolates were analyzed by us. It was shown that they first appeared in hedgehogs in the early 1800s.
It isn't our fault that antibiotics are used all over the place. Taking antibiotics away robsbacteria of their superpower and leaves them a little bit weaker than their non- resistant kin.
It takes a lot of energy to make the enzymes that kill the antibiotics. In periods when antibiotics are not used, resistantbacteria will be outcompeted by susceptiblebacteria.
If we really want to show MRSA no mercy, we should only use the methicillin. It might be a good idea to keep a quills-length away from the Nordics.
Karen Hopkin is for Scientific American's 60-second science.
This is a transcript of the show.
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