Remote tribe’s antibiotic resistance concerns experts

MIAMI: A remote tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon appears to be resistant to modern antibiotics even though its members have had barely any contact with the outside world, researchers said on Friday.
The people, known as the Yanomami, were first spotted by air in 2008, and were visited a year later by a Venezuelan medical team that took samples from 34 of them, including skin and mouth swabs and stool samples.
To protect their privacy, the name of their village was withheld from publication.
Scientists found that the tribespeople’s microbiome — the community of bacteria, fungi and viruses that live in and on the body — was far more diverse than seen in comparison communities of rural Venezuelans and Malawians. Their microbiome was twice as diverse as observed in a reference group of Americans.
The remote villagers are generally healthy, and that may be thanks to a microbiome that “contains perhaps the highest levels of bacterial diversity ever reported in a human group,” said the study in the journal Science Advances.
While the Yanomami had some T-shirts, machetes and metal cans, suggesting some limited contact with civilisation, they have not been exposed to the many elements of contemporary life that can cut down on microbes, such as eating processed foods, taking antibiotics, hand sanitising and delivering babies by Caesarean section, scientists said.
Some microbes seemed to have a protective effect on their health, such as preventing the formation of kidney stones.
The tribespeople live in small villages, in a remote area that is accessible only by helicopter or by travelling for days in a canoe.
Researchers found no evidence of obesity or malnutrition among the people they saw, who lived on a diet that included fish, frogs, insects, plantains and a fermented cassava drink, said Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello of the New York University School of Medicine.