Klebsiella aerogenes
Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not ingenious in its determination to increase the suffering in the world with its specially designed pathogens - parasitic microorganisms such as bacteria that cause diseases, sickness and death.
And what better location for increasing suffering is there than a hospital where people are already unwell and easy victims for more infections with life-threatening pathogens?
One of the nastier examples of just such a pathogen is Klebsiella, and not content with one species, creationism's favourite sadist have designed two - Klebsiella pneumoniae and K. aerogenes, both of which are multi-resistant, i.e. resistant to multiple antibiotics and both of which actually thrive and multiply rapidly in conditions where other bacteria are being killed off with antibiotics.
Information about the pathogens, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Klebsiella aerogenes, please. Klebsiella pneumoniaeTo a devote of the malevolent designer, it must seem at times that every move medical scientists makes to combat these parasites and so reduce the suffering in the world, the malevolent designer is ready with ever-more ingenious ways to overcome their efforts.
Overview:
Klebsiella pneumoniae is a Gram-negative, non-motile, encapsulated, lactose-fermenting, facultative anaerobic bacterium. It is a member of the Enterobacteriaceae family and is commonly found in the environment, including soil, water, and plants. It can also be part of the normal flora of the human intestines.
Pathogenicity:
Klebsiella pneumoniae is a significant pathogen, particularly in healthcare settings. It can cause a variety of infections, including:
- Pneumonia: Often severe, hospital-acquired, and associated with a high mortality rate.
- Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs): Especially in catheterized patients.
- Sepsis: Can occur when the bacteria enter the bloodstream.
- Liver Abscesses: Especially in individuals with diabetes.
- Wound Infections: Common in patients with surgical or traumatic wounds.
Virulence Factors:
- Capsule: Prevents phagocytosis and enhances virulence.
- Fimbriae: Allow adherence to surfaces, facilitating infection.
- Siderophores: Sequester iron from the host, aiding bacterial growth.
- Lipopolysaccharide (LPS): Contributes to the bacterium's resistance to host defenses.
Antibiotic Resistance:
Klebsiella pneumoniae is known for its ability to acquire and develop resistance to multiple antibiotics. This includes:
- Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamases (ESBLs): Enzymes that confer resistance to cephalosporins and monobactams.
- Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE): Strains resistant to carbapenem antibiotics, often due to the production of carbapenemases.
Treatment:
Treatment can be challenging due to antibiotic resistance. Options include:
- Carbapenems: For ESBL-producing strains, though resistance is increasing.
- Polymyxins (e.g., Colistin): Often used as a last-resort treatment for multi-drug resistant strains.
- Combination Therapy: Sometimes used to improve efficacy and reduce resistance development.
Klebsiella aerogenes
Overview:
Klebsiella aerogenes, formerly known as Enterobacter aerogenes, is a Gram-negative, rod-shaped, motile bacterium. It is also part of the Enterobacteriaceae family and is commonly found in soil, water, sewage, and as part of the human gastrointestinal flora.
Pathogenicity:
Klebsiella aerogenes is an opportunistic pathogen that can cause infections primarily in healthcare settings, including:
- Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia: Particularly in immunocompromised patients or those on ventilators.
- Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs): Often associated with catheter use.
- Bacteremia: Can occur following invasive procedures or in immunocompromised individuals.
- Wound Infections: Especially in post-surgical patients.
Virulence Factors:
- Capsule: Provides resistance to phagocytosis.
- Flagella: Allow motility and contribute to colonization.
- Adhesins: Facilitate attachment to host tissues.
- Enterotoxins: Contribute to disease symptoms.
Antibiotic Resistance:
Klebsiella aerogenes is also known for its ability to develop antibiotic resistance, including:
- AmpC Beta-Lactamase Production: Confers resistance to many beta-lactam antibiotics.
- Multi-Drug Resistance (MDR): Can occur due to the acquisition of resistance genes.
Treatment:
Treatment can be difficult due to resistance issues. Options include:
- Carbapenems: Often effective but resistance is a growing problem.
- Aminoglycosides: Used in combination with other antibiotics.
- Fluoroquinolones: Effective against some strains but resistance is common.
Prevention and Control:
Both Klebsiella pneumoniae and Klebsiella aerogenes are notable for their role in healthcare-associated infections. Prevention and control strategies include:
- Strict Adherence to Infection Control Practices: Hand hygiene, use of personal protective equipment (PPE), and environmental cleaning.
- Antibiotic Stewardship Programs: To minimize the development of antibiotic resistance.
- Surveillance Programs: To monitor and respond to outbreaks of resistant strains.
Summary
Klebsiella pneumoniae and Klebsiella aerogenes are significant pathogens, particularly in healthcare settings, due to their ability to cause severe infections and develop resistance to multiple antibiotics. Effective management relies on prevention, rapid identification, and appropriate antibiotic therapy, taking into account the resistance patterns of the infecting strain.
And, before creationists try the usual excuses - courtesy of Michael J. Behe's biologically nonsensical 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' - these bacteria are equipped with a flagellum, his 'irreducibly complex, therefore intelligently designed' non-sequitur that is traditionally waved around by creationists as 'proof' that the biblical god is real and active designs things, without too much concern about the false dichotomy fallacy at the heart of the 'proof' or the fact that there is a readily available explanation for how complex systems like flagella evolve.
But Behe is never slow to shoot himself in the foot or to inadvertently wreck creationists arguments, like a fireship launched into the wind, so he now has his followers believing that 'irreducibly complex' structures, while being 'proof' that their god designs things, are part of organisms that are actually the result of genetic entropy and devolution for which their god is absolved of all blame, as they are all the fault of human 'Sin'.
So, if you believe in this supposedly intelligent [sic] designer, what has it done to make these bacteria such powerful tools for increasing suffering?
This is the discovery of a team of scientists led by the American Dental Association (ADA) Forsyth Institute, Cambridge, MA. USA, whose findings have just been published, open access, in the journal Microbiome. They found that these pathogens have adapted to the conditions commonly found in hospitals and so are able to thrive and be transmitted more readily to other patients. They not only thrive in conditions of low nutrition but live off the bodies of other bacteria that can't survive low nutrient environments.
The team's work is explained in an ADA Forsyth Institute News release:
Scientists identify possible new transmission factor in hospital-acquired Klebsiella infections
Scientists at ADA Forsyth Institute (AFI) have identified a critical factor that may contribute to the spread of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), shedding light on why these infections are so difficult to combat. Their study reveals that the dangerous multidrug resistant (MDR) pathogen, Klebsiella, thrives under nutrient-deprived polymicrobial community conditions found in hospital environments.
According to the World Health Organization, HAIs pose significant risks to patients, often resulting in prolonged hospital stays, severe health complications, and a 10% mortality rate. One of the well-known challenging aspects of treating HAIs is the pathogens’ resistance to multiple drugs. In a recent study published in Microbiome, AFI scientists discovered that Klebsiella colonizing a healthy person not only have natural MDR capability, but also dominate the bacterial community when starved of nutrients.
Our research demonstrated that Klebsiella can outcompete other microorganisms in its community when deprived of nutrients. We analyzed samples of saliva and nasal fluids to observe Klebsiella‘s response to starvation conditions. Remarkably, in such conditions, Klebsiella rapidly proliferates, dominating the entire microbial community as all other bacteria die off.
Associate Professor Batbileg Bor, PhD, lead author
Department of Microbiology
ADA Forsyth Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Klebsiella is one of the top three pathogens responsible for HAIs, including pneumonia and irritable bowel disease. As colonizing opportunistic pathogens, they naturally inhabit the oral and nasal cavities of healthy individuals but can become pathogenic under certain conditions.
Hospital environments provide ideal conditions for Klebsiella to spread. Nasal or saliva droplets on hospital surfaces, sink drains, and the mouths and throats of patients on ventilators, are all starvation environments. When a patient is placed on a ventilator, they stop receiving food by mouth, causing the bacteria in their mouth to be deprived of nutrients and Klebsiella possibly outcompete other oral bacteria. The oral and nasal cavities may serve as reservoirs for multiple opportunistic pathogens this way.
Associate Professor Batbileg Bor, PhD.
Additionally, Klebsiella can derive nutrients from dead bacteria, allowing it to survive for extended periods under starvation conditions. The researchers found that whenever Klebsiella was present in the oral or nasal samples, they persisted for over 120 days after being deprived of nutrition.
Other notable findings from the study include the observation that Klebsiella from the oral cavity, which harbors a diverse microbial community, was less prevalent and abundant than those from the nasal cavity, a less diverse environment. These findings suggest that microbial diversity and specific commensal (non-pathogenic) saliva bacteria may play a crucial role in limiting the overgrowth of Klebsiella species.
The groundbreaking research conducted by AFI scientists offers new insights into the transmission and spread of hospital-acquired infections, paving the way for more effective prevention and treatment strategies.
Additional collaborators on the project include: Xuesong He, Alex S. Grossman, Jett Liu, Nell Spencer, Wenyuan Shi, and Hatice Hasturk of ADA Forsyth; Daniel R. Utter of California Institute of Technology; Lei Lei of Sichuan University; Nidia Castro dos Santos of Guarulhos University; and Jonathon L. Baker of Oregon Health & Science University.
AbstractComing on top of the news of the Dengue virus becoming better at spreading and making more people sick, this news should thrill devotees of creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer, especially those who think making people sick and increasing the suffering in the world is an act of a loving god.
Background
The human oral and nasal cavities can act as reservoirs for opportunistic pathogens capable of causing acute infection. These microbes asymptomatically colonize the human oral and nasal cavities which facilitates transmission within human populations via the environment, and they routinely possess clinically significant antibiotic resistance genes. Among these opportunistic pathogens, the Klebsiella genus stands out as a notable example, with its members frequently linked to nosocomial infections and multidrug resistance. As with many colonizing opportunistic pathogens, the essential transmission factors influencing the spread of Klebsiella species among both healthy and diseased individuals remain unclear.
Results
Here, we explored a possible explanation by investigating the ability of oral and nasal Klebsiella species to outcompete their native microbial community members under in vitro starvation conditions, which could be analogous to external hospital environments or the microenvironment of mechanical ventilators. When K. pneumoniae and K. aerogenes were present within a healthy human oral or nasal sample, the bacterial community composition shifted dramatically under starvation conditions and typically became enriched in Klebsiella species. Furthermore, introducing K. pneumoniae exogenously into a native microbial community lacking K. pneumoniae, even at low inoculum, led to repeated enrichment under starvation. Precise monitoring of K. pneumoniae within these communities undergoing starvation indicated rapid initial growth and prolonged viability compared to other members of the microbiome. K. pneumoniae strains isolated from healthy individuals’ oral and nasal cavities also exhibited resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics and were genetically similar to clinical and gut isolates. In addition, we found that in the absence of Klebsiella species, other understudied opportunistic pathogens, such as Peptostreptococcus, increased in relative abundance under starvation conditions.
Conclusions
Our findings establish an environmental and microbiome community circumstance that allows for the enrichment of Klebsiella species and other opportunistic pathogens. Klebsiella’s enrichment may hinge on its ability to quickly outgrow other members of the microbiome. The ability to outcompete other commensal bacteria and to persist under harsh environmental conditions could be an important factor that contributes to enhanced transmission in both commensal and pathogenic contexts.
Background
Microbes that are typically of low abundance and harmless in their normal niche, but potentially dangerous under specific circumstances are termed colonizing opportunistic pathogens (COPs) [1]. Translocation of human oral bacteria to other body sites has been associated with noncommunicable, chronic systemic illnesses including diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease [2,3,4,5]. The oral microbiota also contains potential opportunistic pathogens that can cause more acute diseases [6]. These oral COPs include pathogens such as Streptococcus pyogenes, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Haemophilus influenzae, which are part of the normal oral community but can cause numerous diseases, including but not limited to streptococcal pharyngitis, pneumonia, sepsis, and/or meningitis [7]. Crucially, oral microbes and COPs can asymptomatically colonize and transmit between people, complicating their disease etiology [8]. Characterizing how oral COPs colonize, transmit, and transition from colonization to infection is crucial, given that human oral fluids can contaminate surfaces and be ingested in the body [9,10,11,12].
Klebsiella species are a prominent example of an oral COP. Typically, oral Klebsiella species exhibit a low prevalence and abundance in populations studied to date [13,14,15], having an increased association with periodontal pockets [14, 16, 17]. Despite their relatively low prevalence in the oral microbiome, whenever they are found, Klebsiella seem to be a consistent colonizer and member of the community [15]. Oral fluids are a major source of contamination in the healthcare setting, particularly in sinks and drains [12, 18], and previous studies have demonstrated that Klebsiella species can persist and transmit particularly well in nosocomial environments [19, 20]. Therefore, a small number of individuals carrying oral Klebsiella species could potentially act as superspreaders, seeding colonization and infection within a larger population and among at-risk persons.
Although routinely carried asymptomatically, Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the six ESKAPE pathogens that can be highly virulent and are routinely resistant to multiple antibiotics [21, 22]. Additionally, other species within Klebsiella, such as K. variicola, K. aerogenes, and K. oxytoca, show similar drug-resistant and virulent phenotypes [21]. As a result, Klebsiella species are a major cause of life-threatening hospital-acquired infections in at-risk immunocompromised and critically ill patients [23]. They are also associated with various gastrointestinal infections, which can lead to gastroenteritis, colitis, and other chronic diseases [24]. The origin of Klebsiella infection has been linked to environmental samples (including soils, plants, and animals), human body sites (including the gut and skin microbiomes), and hospital environments (including contaminated sinks and drains) [13, 19,20,21, 25, 26]. Despite the strong linkages between Klebsiella and nosocomial infections, the role of the human oral cavity as a reservoir for Klebsiella species associated with nosocomial and gut infections has been largely overlooked. Most research on oral Klebsiella as an opportunistic pathogen was conducted in mouse studies and has demonstrated that mouse or human oral Klebsiella species can migrate to the mouse gut and cause various inflammation and colitis [27, 28].
Illustrating their toughness and ability to survive in various stress conditions, numerous nosocomial pathogens, including Klebsiella, have been shown to persist on various abiotic surfaces [29, 30]. These bacteria possess various mechanisms to withstand environmental stress, enabling them to survive challenging conditions for varying durations. While these adaptations may have evolved in response to environmental stress, many environmental stress responses are often useful for pathogenic niches, including desiccation resistance [31], chemical competition [32], and persistence states [33]. Our previous study examined the oral microbiome community under starvation conditions akin to those of an expelled oral droplet persisting on a surface [34]. We found that members of the Enterobacteriaceae family, and particularly Klebsiella species, outlasted other bacterial community members to emerge as the only surviving taxa. This finding was assessed using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and traditional growth methods; confirming that, among the studied samples, Enterobacteriaceae were the majority of the transcriptionally active bacteria after 100 days of starvation, and the only taxa that could be recovered by plating.
The previous study, however, was limited by a small sample size and did not examine the ubiquity of the Enterobacteriaceae survival phenomenon. In this study, we further assessed the capability of Klebsiella species to persist under starvation conditions by including additional clinical samples from the oral cavity. We also examined nares samples given that nares fluids can contaminate hospital surfaces. We observed that when Klebsiella species were present within a community, they consistently enriched in starved communities, especially Klebsiella pneumoniae, which not only endured starvation but also proliferated rapidly to establish dominance within the first 24 h of starvation. Furthermore, all cultured strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from healthy human oral and nasal cavities exhibited multidrug resistance. These strains were found to be phylogenetically intermingled with previously sequenced clinically relevant and healthy gut isolates. In the absence of Klebsiella species, other bacteria such as Peptostreptococcus were enriched in starved communities. These findings collectively suggest that oral COPs, such as Klebsiella species, have the capability to persist longer than other members of oral and nasal microbial communities under starvation conditions. This enduring trait might have the potential to influence the colonization-to-infection process, especially in areas where the opportunistic pathogen has to go through starvation or other stress environments.
Liu, J., Spencer, N., Utter, D.R. et al.
Persistent enrichment of multidrug-resistant Klebsiella in oral and nasal communities during long-term starvation. Microbiome 12, 132 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-024-01854-5
Copyright: © 2024 The authors/BioMed Central Ltd.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax
ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good
This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
This is horrifying. Klebsiella is immune to antibiotics. Is it also immune to soaps and hand sanitizers? And it flourishes in hospitals. How can we protect ourselves against this microbe? It sounds similar to the Aids virus. This is an example of pure evil in Nature. If a conscious creator designed this then it's an evil, cruel, sadistic, malevolent monster intent on causing suffering and death. It's less depressing to believe that this is the result of blind, impersonal, mindless, amoral forces of evolution.
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