According to an article by David Wahlberg in the Wisconsin State Journal (April 14, 2014), soil-based microbes produced miracle antibiotics after World War II. In Alexander McCall Smith's book, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, for example, a character in Botswana, Africa, attributes cures to the kgaba plant. But recent soil-based research keeps rediscovering the same antibiotics.Consequently, kids can get in on the search for ants, beetles, bees, wasps, termites, sponges, and sea squirts that have found new microbes in bacteria that could act as antibiotics in humans.
At the moment, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding a $16 million, five-year study to discover bugs, marine life, and other species that could help produce the drugs needed to treat staph and other infections. (An earlier blog post, "Medical Profession Suffers from International Conflict," tells how blue light phototherapy is being used to treat staph infections.) In January, 2015, the teixobactin antibiotic which has been shown to foil infection resistance passed animal tests without side effects.
Young people interested in helping collect specimens or in doing a project involving the development of antibiotics from new microbes might get in touch with:
Dr. David Andes, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin
Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Florida, Wisconsin, and possibly in Hawaii
Tim Bugin, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Puerto Rica and the Florida Keys.
Also see the later posts, "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Bacteria Talk to Each Other."
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