A Yanomami Indian (Photo : Reuters/Carlos Garcia Rawlins)
According to researchers, a tribe in Venezuelan Amazon seems to be resistant to modern antibiotics even though the tribe had never been exposed to antibiotic drugs before, Nature World News reported.
In 2008, Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at the New York University School of Medicine, asked for permission to study the people from the Yanomami tribe. In 2009, Venezuelan medical team visited the tribe and gathered mouth and skin DNA, and faecal specimen from 34 Yanomami villagers.
Scientists then sequenced the gut bacteria from the Amazonian tribe and compared them to the samples from industrialized people. They found that the Yanomami have remarkably diverse gut bacteria composition compared to people in industrialized countries.
Also, researchers studied the samples to detect the presence of antibiotic-resistant genes and discovered that Yanomami had gut bacteria that can fend off antibiotics.
The study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, said that the remote villagers are healthy, and that may be due to a microbiome which contains the highest levels of bacterial diversity ever documented in a human group.
According to researchers, these Yanomami have not been exposed to the various elements of modern life that can cut down on microbes, such as delivering babies by Caesarean section, hand sanitizing, taking antibiotics and consuming processed foods.
Furthermore, it was found that some microbes appeared to exhibit a protective effect on their health such as preventing kidney stone formation.
Scientists found no evidence of malnutrition or obesity among the tribespeople, who lived on a diet that consisted of a fermented cassava drink, plantains, insects, frogs and fish.
However, researchers did not collect samples of the tribe's drink and food, which could disclose more about how Yanomami villagers achieved their diverse gut flora, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
