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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/13/bacteriophage-deadliest-being-on-planet-earth-antimicrobial-resistance-superbugs>
"Humans have been visiting Merri Creek for millennia. The waterway snakes from
Wallan, north of Melbourne, down through the suburban sprawl and flows into the
Yarra River. The Wurundjeri, the traditional owners, once camped on Merri’s
banks, dug up yam daisy and collected shellfish from the creek bed. When the
Melbourne founder, John Batman, stumbled upon the creek in 1835, he scribbled a
note in his diary describing it as a “lovely stream of water”.
Almost 185 years later, Trevor Lithgow, a biochemist at Monash University, and
a student in his charge visited that same lovely stream, bent down at its bank
with an empty flask attached to a broom pole, and retrieved a double shot of
water. They bundled the sample into a bag and drove it back to examine at their
laboratory.
There, they mixed the sample with a culture of
Klebsiella pneumoniae, a
rod-shaped bacteria, prevalent in nature, and one that colonises human stomachs
and lines our intestines. It forms snot-like colonies, gobbling up and
fermenting lactose to fuel itself. Usually,
Klebsiella is harmless.
But in certain situations,
Klebsiella can establish itself outside the gut –
and then it becomes a threat. “You would not want to have an infection that’s
driven by
Klebsiella,” Lithgow says.
Klebsiella is defined by the World Health Organization as a “priority
pathogen”. Some prefer to call it a “superbug”. It’s a bacteria that poses a
major threat to global health because some strains have evolved to evade our
most potent drugs, in a process known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
At Merri Creek, Lithgow was hoping to find something
Klebsiella couldn’t
evade.
The WHO notes AMR “puts many of the gains of modern medicine at risk” because
it diminishes our ability to counter infectious disease, making routine surgery
and chemotherapy much riskier."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
