Even In Medicine, All Roads Lead To Rome

The world is hardly lacking for public health crises and challenges. Increasing cancer rates, especially in younger people; the complicated effects that climate change will have on our health, particularly when it comes to things such as heat waves; the enduring obesity/diabetes crisis; America's own inimitable disaster of a health care system. The list goes on, really, but one thing that has to go near the top is our struggle against antibiotic-resistant infections. 

Credit: Bath & North East Somerset Council

For those of us sitting in comfortable homes, living generally healthy lives, this particular dilemma isn't one we have to worry about. The average middle-class American isn't going to stumble across a deadly superbug over the course of our day-to-day routine. But rest assured, antibiotic resistance is an issue; in 2019, over a million people died as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant infection, with it contributing in part to nearly 4 million more. By 2050, the number of deaths could reach 10 million a year, with it costing the world a trillion dollars.

While there are always weird, terrible people out there to disagree about anything, most of us see those numbers as something probably best avoided. The problem is that we've kind of hit a brick wall with discovering new antibiotics to beat out those nasty, antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA. Traditionally, we've used bacteria living in regular, everyday locations like the soil (or in bread), but at this point, we've found every possible chemical and compound from those sources. When we go back to the tap, all we do is rediscover the same compounds we've already used and exhausted.

The solution, then, is to search for new potential antibiotics in locations we haven't drained of all value or novelty. Someplace new. Or someplace very old.

The Roman Baths in Bath, England, is the only geothermal spring in the United Kingdom, with the water coming out of the ground at a toasty 42 °C (about 107 °F) before settling into a more comfortable 30 °C at the Great Bath. The water there is mineral rich and has been used as a curative treatment by people for thousands of years. It's also filled with numerous microorganisms found nowhere else on Earth, which is what a group of British researchers was interested in.

In particular, the researchers focused on the King's Spring, which is where the water is at its hottest. During testing against a group of common antibiotic-resistant pathogens (the ESKAPE group), 15 strains of bacteria showed significant broad-spectrum antibiotic activity; a particular standout was a variety of Clostridium swellfunianum, which strongly inhibited multiple Gram-negative pathogens when living at its preferred temperature of 45 °C. This, the researchers said, drives home the point that we should test bacteria in their native conditions to maximize their antibiotic-producing potential.

Naturally, we can't just slap these new, helpful bacteria onto someone suffering from an antibiotic-resistant infection and call it a day. The researcher plan to sequence the genomes of the bacteria they found so that the specific genes responsible for the antibiotic activity can be identified. Once we know that, then we can start making novel antibiotics for our fight against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The fact that their research involves spending a lot of time at a beautiful, relaxing hot spring is purely coincidental, I'm sure. "Oh, geez, we're all out of bacteria to test on, we'll have to go spend the day at the spa, collecting more. Oh, what an awful predicament this is." They truly are the bravest of souls over there in England.