I’m not normally a fan of surprises. Maybe that’s because I’m one of those unlucky ones whose surprises are always unpleasant:
“Surprise!! The washer has just emptied itself all over the kitchen floor.”
“Surprise!! Mum has come to stay for a few days!”
“Surprise!! I’m pregnant!!”
You get my point. So, it’s always a nice when the surprise is nice, if you know what I mean.
It was one of those rare occasions on Saturday when after a day of diving at Capernwray I attended the Ghost Fishing UK Winter Warmer social event which this year, after a couple of years abstinence due to COVID, was held up north.
If you’ve never been to a Ghost Fishing talk, then I would highly recommend that you do. It’s super interesting to see what the team get up to; how they do their surveying, how they decide when / when not to lift lost gear as well as how an actual lift of a large net or string of pots is done (CCR divers may not be quiet so happy!!).
You also get to find out about how the team are working on the circularity of the process. After all, one of the most difficult things to work out is what to do with all this fishing gear once it’s been recovered – How can we turn this waste into something useful again?
The best answer of course is to give it back to the fishermen from which it came as they will only buy more which means there is more to get lost.
But it’s also good to see that some of the nets / pots that cannot be returned are being turned into other useful items. From jewellery to plant pots there now seems to be a plethora of things that can be made with at least some of the recovered ghost gear and its good to see these businesses are starting to thrive.
The awesome folks over at Behaviour Change Cornwall who make some amazing jewellery and other items from recovered ghost gear are generously offering a 10% discount to the UKD Community. So check out their shop and pick you and your loved ones up a little treat whilst saving the planet and a few quid. Nice!!
Use the code "ukdiver" in the "coupon" section at checkout to save 10% - Spend over £35 and get free P&P too!!
So, what was the surprise I hear you cry?
Well, that came in the form of Dr Emily Addington from Glasgow University who after the Ghost Fishing talk gave an amazing talk on something I hadn’t heard about before: Dive for Antibiotics.
You’re bound to remember a few years ago that “superbugs” were everywhere in the news. New strains of old diseases that because of our overuse of antibiotics and the fact we didn’t take the full course prescribed to us by the doctor, had developed resistance to many of our drugs and were getting more difficult to deal with – Going into hospital would likely kill you when you caught super MRSA and eventually, we all would die. Obviously, we didn’t all die and the stories subsided and eventually, faded from memory.
So job done then right? Some boffin had a think and sorted it all out? Erm…. NOPE!!
The picture painted by Dr Addington during her talk is one of a war still raging and one it seems we may be losing.
She had stories of recent cases where people had got an infection that a few years ago wouldn’t have presented a major problem but died because that particular bug had become resistant to all known antibiotics. One woman in the US was given 26 different types, all of which the infection in her shrugged off! That’s one bad ass bug I hope I never meet!
So we asked the obvious question – Why don’t we just make some new, better ones then?
The simple answer is that we don’t know how. We’re not that clever. Mother nature knows though and the ones we do have are borrowed from her.
Yes, antibiotics are chemicals found in nature. They are produced by micro-organisms as weapons in their fight to survive in the world.
In Scuba terms, it’s the same as when corals grow too close to one another. There is a fight over space and resources ending in one coral extruding its digestive tract over its neighbour and literally digesting the encroacher away. Here, the organisms create bio-weapons to use against their neighbours instead.
Researchers like Dr Addington collect samples of these micro-weapon builders and test whether the bioweapons they create can be used to kill the various bugs and diseases that infect us, and if they can, another antibiotic is born!
Now apparently back in the 1950s and 60s, you couldn’t leave the house without tripping over a new antibiotic. They were everywhere. But these are now useless as the nasty bugs have become resistant to them.
So just like the war that is going on in the microscopic world where one weapon becoming ineffective leads to the development of another effective weapon, so we too must continually change our arsenal of weapons to keep them effective (and use them less so bugs don’t get immune to them as quickly in the first place!).
Therefore, we’re forever on the hunt for new micro-organisms that have new and novel weaponry we can use.
The problem is that we’ve looked in all the easy to reach places – And the cupboard is now bare. Which is why people like Dr Addington are turning to look in the more extreme places on the planet to find new and effective antibiotics, like in our seas and oceans.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we come in.
A couple of times a year Dr Addington will ask for volunteers to collect samples for her and her team to analyse. This basically involves us divers collecting a very small sediment sample from, well, anywhere!! Under a wreck, in a cave, bottom of a reef… it doesn’t matter. These micro-organisms live everywhere, and the team are looking for as wide a variety as possible. No one place provides richer pickings than any other.
Once the samples are sent in, the team grow out all the bugs in that sample, isolate them, grow them on individually further, then assuming there are some novel types present, test these against a pre-defined raft of nasties to see if any of them are producing chemicals that actively kill off the nasties. If one is found to be effective (active), they then analyse the chemicals the good bug is producing, isolate the active one and then do more testing and hopefully, a new antibiotic is found that can be reproduced and used.
Not many samples will be active. In fact, most won’t be. If finding antibiotics was easy, we wouldn’t be here talking about this and as you might imagine, the process takes time which is why the team are not sampling constantly; they have to process the last batch before they can move on to the next.
When we had the talk, Dr Addington said that they had recently stumbled upon a bug that appeared to be producing compounds that were effective against ALL of the nasties it was put up against, which is obviously super exciting.
Best bit, although she doesn’t know specifics about where the sample came from so as to prevent any bias, she does know that it came from UK waters!!
I can’t wait until the next wave of sampling because I’m going to get mine for the team. That little thimble of mud may well just hold the key to developing more of the life saving medicine that I’m sure we’ve all taken at one point or another, because the simple fact is, if we don’t find more, we’re going back to pre 1950’s living where even the slightest scratch or blister could kill you.
If you’re interested in collecting samples for the team, then follow the Dive for Antibiotics Instagram account and check out the Project Baseline website – You might even win a Shearwater Computer if you find the sample that provides the most interesting compounds!!
Comments