WORLD OF MEDICINE

New Dirt on Dirt

- Beth Weinhouse

Researchers at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a chemical in soil that can kill bacteria, including several that are resistant to existing antibiotics. The use of antibiotics over decades has allowed some organisms to mutate so that the drugs can’t kill them. The new chemical—a peptide called lario-cidin—might be able to fight some of the drug-resistant bacterial infections responsible for more than one million deaths worldwide every year.

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