Superbugs catch a ride on air pollution particles. Is that bad news for people?
By Gabriel Spitzer
In a Ukrainian hospital, wounded soldiers languish with stubborn . In Liberia, a young mother's surgery wound after a C-section. Superbugs hiding in cause multiple deaths and many more cases of blindness.
Worldwide, the toll of drug-resistant infections has only been growing. A found that 1.27 million people died in 2019 from infections resistant to antimicrobial drugs. The annual death toll could reach 10 million by 2050, .
Now highlights a surprising potential vector for the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR): air pollution.
"Airborne fine particulate matter, we usually call it PM2.5, contains a cocktail of microorganisms," says Hong Chen, professor of environmental engineering at Zhejiang University and corresponding author of the study.
at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France, says it's an important relationship to probe, but she's yet not convinced that air pollution is the ultimate culprit."I would be careful to draw conclusions on the causal relationship," says Buelow. "There's an increase in antimicrobial resistance in the past 20 years. There's an increase in pollution in the past 20 years. There's also an increase in population growth in the last 20 years. There's a strong correlation, and we have to continue to study this. But I'm not sure we can conclude from this study that this is a causal relationship."
of particulates). The study calculates that bringing global air pollution down to the WHO's target levels by 2050 would cut global antibiotic resistance by 16.8% and avoid nearly one in four premature deaths attributable to AMR."This means if we can control PM 2.5, then we can have a twofold result," says Chen.
Elena Buelow agrees that studies like Chen's can help us see the problems holistically.
"This is all correlated and it's important to bring awareness to that so that people and policymakers are woken up."
