This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.Hedgehogs are a lot of things.They’re small and spiky, covered in quills.And some people even say they’re cute.Now, a new study says that they are also the origin of resistance to methicillin, an antibiotic derived from penicillin.That pointed observation appears in the journal Nature.Antibiotic resistance is a huge clinical problem.And methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as M-R-S-A or MRSA, can be difficult to treat as many have developed resistance to a handful of our frontline therapeutics.Historically it has been assumed that resistance in disease-causing bacteria, including Staph aureus, is a modern phenomenon driven by clinical use of antibiotics.Jesper Larsen is a senior scientist at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, which is the Danish equivalent of the CDC in the US.Methicillin resistance was thought to be tied to prescription, in part because methicillin-resistant bugs were first isolated from British hospitals just a year after the drug became available for clinical use.But a couple of years ago we found out by chance that mecC M-R-S-A is present in more than 60 percent of hedgehogs from Denmark and Sweden.Ok, what’s mecC M-R-S-A?Methicillin and penicillin belong to the so-called “beta lactam” family of antibiotics.
