--- title: "Antibiotic Resistance — quarantine" description: "Claims about antibiotic resistance that could not be confirmed against a primary source, with their wording, their claimed sources, what was tried, and what document would settle each one." author: "AI (Claude Fable 5.1, extra-high thinking)" theme: common/themes/berean2/theme.php --- # Antibiotic Resistance: quarantine Part of [Antibiotic Resistance](./). Nothing here is called false. Each item is a claim that circulates in the creationist literature and that this article does not print, with the reason. ## 1. Resistant bacteria recovered from the frozen bodies of polar explorers **Wording as it circulates.** Three versions, in order of publication. Carl Wieland, *Creation* 20(1):10-13, December 1997: > "Bacteria revived from the frozen intestines of explorers who died in polar expeditions carried resistance to several modern antibiotics, which had not been invented when the explorers died." Don Batten, Creation Ministries International, 15 November 2001: > "In fact, some bacteria revived from corpses frozen before the development of antibiotics have shown resistance." Georgia Purdom, Answers in Genesis, 10 July 2007: > "Bacteria that are resistant to modern antibiotics have even been found in the frozen bodies of people who died long before those antibiotics were discovered or synthesized." **Claimed sources.** - Wieland's footnote 2: "McGuire, R., Eerie: Human Arctic fossils yield resistant bacteria, *Medical Tribune* December 1988, pp. 1, 23." - Batten gives no source for the sentence. - Purdom's footnote 1: "Thompson, Burt, Bacterial antibiotic resistance: proof of evolution? www.apologeticspress.org/articles/439." **What was tried, and what was found.** The underlying work exists and was traced to a full citation. It is: > Kowalewska-Grochowska, K.; Amy, R.; Lui, B.; McWhirter, R.; Merrill, H. "Isolation and sensitivities of century-old bacteria from the Franklin expedition." Interscience Conference of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Los Angeles, California, 24 October 1988. That citation comes from reference `10_CR24` in the Crossref record for Notman, D. and Beattie, O. B., "The palaeoimaging and forensic anthropology of frozen sailors from the Franklin Arctic expedition mass disaster (1845-1848): a detailed presentation of two radiological surveys," in *Human Mummies* (Springer, 1996), pp. 93-106, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-6565-2_10. The Springer chapter page itself is bot-walled and returns a 3 KB stub, but the Crossref API returns its whole reference list. **It is a conference presentation and was never published as a paper.** Routes tried for the abstract itself: Europe PMC (no record), PubMed (no record), Crossref (no record), a web search, the Springer chapter page, and the publications of the Franklin forensic project, which report lead levels, radiology and *Clostridium* spores but not antibiotic susceptibilities. The 1988 ICAAC abstract books are not online. Wieland's *Medical Tribune* footnote is a trade newspaper story about that presentation. No digital archive of *Medical Tribune* for December 1988 was found. Purdom's footnote is the weakest link. Both `apologeticspress.org/articles/439` and the slug address now 404. **The article was retrieved from the Internet Archive capture of 18 October 2005 and read in full, 2,363 words. It does not mention frozen bodies, the Arctic, polar expeditions, the Franklin expedition, or any explorer.** Purdom's footnote does not support her sentence. That is a citation defect, not a fabrication: the claim itself traces elsewhere, as above. **What would change the verdict.** The printed *Program and Abstracts of the 28th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy* (American Society for Microbiology, 1988), which is a library holding. It would say which organisms were isolated, which antibiotics they resisted, and whether contamination was controlled. **Why nothing is lost by dropping it.** The article makes the same point with `baker-2014c`: a *Shigella flexneri* isolated from a British soldier in 1915, held in a national culture collection ever since, sequenced in 2014, resistant to penicillin at 24 mg/L and erythromycin at 16 mg/L, with the responsible genes named. That is a published genome with a museum accession record instead of an unpublished abstract, and it needs no assumption about deep time. ## 2. "Soil samples from villages where modern antibiotics had never been used" **Wording.** Carl Wieland, same article: > "Soil samples from villages where modern antibiotics had never been used show that some of the germs are already resistant to drugs like methicillin which have never existed in nature." **Status.** **Not quarantined; cited in the article.** It is recorded here because the claim is given no footnote of its own in Wieland's article, and because the parenthesis "which have never existed in nature" is doing work that should be checked. Methicillin is semi-synthetic. The claim is now much better documented than it was in 1997 by `bhullar-2012` and `dcosta-2011`, and those are cited instead of Wieland's unsourced soil samples wherever a number is needed. Note against it: Bhullar's Gram-positive cave strains showed **no** resistance to the wholly synthetic drugs ciprofloxacin and linezolid, nor to the semi-synthetic rifampicin and minocycline. So "already resistant to drugs that never existed in nature" is not a general pattern, and the article says so. ## 3. The residue number for the cost-free ribosomal substitution **Wording.** Andersson and Hughes, *Nature Reviews Microbiology* 8:264, 2010: > "This implies that the K42R mutation in 30S ribosomal protein S12 is a genuine cost-free resistance mutation." Melnyk, Wong and Kassen, *Evolutionary Applications* 8:280, 2015, describing what appears to be the same substitution, call it **K424R**. **Status.** Both quotations are verified against their own papers. The two papers disagree on the numbering, and the primary both of them cite, Sander et al. 2002, was not obtained. **No residue number for this substitution is printed anywhere in the article.** The article says "a ribosomal protein S12 substitution" instead. **What would change it.** Sander, P. et al., "Fitness cost of chromosomal drug resistance-conferring mutations," *Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy* 46:1204-1211, 2002.