Dental amalgam and multiple antibiotic resistance: an untested hypothesis.
Abstract
Receive: RSS Feeds, eTOCs, free email alerts (when new articles cite this article), more» Information about commercial reprint orders: http://aac.asm.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml To subscribe to to another ASM Journal go to: http://journals.asm.org/site/subscriptions/ ANTIMICROBIAL AGENTS AND CHEMOTHERAPY, Aug. 1993, p. 1730-1731 0066-4804/93/081730-02$02.00/0 Copyright © 1993, American Society for Microbiology Vol. 37, No. 8 Letter to the Editor In a recent article in your journal, Summers et al. (3) suggested that exposure to mercury (Hg) from dental amalgams resulted in an increased incidence of multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the normal floras of nonmedicated subjects. However, the study does not allow such conclusions, and the authors' inferences are unwarranted. The investigators first reported the results of a study that attempted to correlate the incidence of Hg resistance with that of antibiotic resistance in human fecal flora. This study was meaningless in the context of the paper. The authors failed to obtain data on the amalgam status of their study subjects, and the accuracy of the estimates used is doubtful, considering the age range of the population; inferences relating amalgam placement with increases in the incidence of antibiotic-reistant fecal flora in this population therefore cannot be made. The authors did attempt to directly correlate