It's Always Something: Seagulls Pooping Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria On Miami Beach

Years ago I was talking Democrat politics with an old Jewish trader and I said something about the "Jewish lobby".
He told me, "Son the only Jewish lobby I know is the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach".
I think of that every time I hear Miami Beach or Jewish lobby.

From Scary Disease Girl at Wired:

Resistance factors — the mutations that allows bacteria to defend themselves against the attack of antibiotics — spread around the world in unpredictable patterns with remarkable speed. How do they do that?

A team of researchers suggested Saturday that seagulls might be to blame.

At the annual ICAAC meeting in Chicago, the largest infectious-disease conference in the United States, Dr. Patrice Nordmann of the Hopital de Bicetre near Paris disclosed results of a small study that looked for resistant bacteria in the feces of seagulls landing on Miami Beach in Florida. During April 2010, they collected 52 stool samples and found within them 83 isolates of gut bacteria such as E. coli.

Seven of the E. coli carried genes that direct production of CTX-M enzymes, a troublesome resistance factor that protects bacteria from the very broad category of drugs called extended-spectrum beta-lactams and that has recently spread worldwide. In addition, 14 of the E. coli were also carrying the gene for the CMY-2 enzyme, which confers the same ESBL resistance on Salmonella. Nine of the isolates were multi-drug resistant.

“Our opinion is that seagulls could be an important vector of multi-drug resistant bacteria,” Nordmann said in a press briefing on the first day of the giant meeting. “These birds fly 200, 300, 1,000 kilometers. We think this is a worldwide phenomenon.”...MORE

HT: Harvard's own Improbable Research who go off on a bit of a tangent:
Horror film dropping from the sky?

Comes news that could lead someone to adapt Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds” and take it in a different direction—a direction that’s both scary and scatalogical.
Maryn McKenna, the science journalist widely known as Scary Disease Girl, tweeted this alert:

Seagulls: threat or menace? They’re pooping resistant bacteria on your favorite beach.

She gives details in her blog: “At the annual ICAAC meeting in Chicago, the largest infectious-disease conference in the United States, Dr. Patrice Nordmann of the Hopital de Bicetre near Paris disclosed results of a small study that looked for resistant bacteria in the feces of seagulls landing on Miami Beach in Florida” Here are videos of (1) Dr. Nordmann, urged on by a Dr. Fox, describing the discovery; (2) a video of Mr. Hitchock lecturing about his own, earlier discovery; (3) an abstract of Mr. Hitchcock’s old thesis; and (4) a short portion of Mr. Hitchock’s seminal work, showing the effect of certain birds upon certain students...