Drug-Resistant Superbugs May Be Growing Even Deadlier
New evidence suggests rising temperatures are giving drug-resistant pathogens an upper hand
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The new coronavirus outbreak may have caught some public officials by surprise, but infectious disease specialists have been anticipating this worst-case scenario for decades. And they warn that the same gaps in our health care system that allowed Covid-19 to flourish could give a window for other types of pathogens to overwhelm us.
One long-standing threat is antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or when so-called superbugs evolve abilities to evade our best germ-killing drugs, whether they be antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, or anthelmintics (which rid bodies of parasites). An AMR outbreak has some similarities to a viral outbreak like Covid-19: There aren’t many tools with which to treat drug-resistant pathogens, and they can easily jump from person to person. Both AMR outbreaks and viral outbreaks spread particularly quickly in places like nursing homes and hospitals, where there is close proximity of people with compromised immune systems.
Of course, AMR and viral outbreaks aren’t exactly the same. Unlike the novel coronavirus, AMR superbugs can also disperse through the food and water supply or as sexually transmitted diseases, and they tend to transmit more slowly than viruses. But the severity of the threat posed by an AMR outbreak can be similar to that of a viral one.
Every year, at least 700,000 deaths are caused by drug-resistant diseases globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which predicts that number could jump to 10 million deaths annually by 2050.
“What we’re watching happen with Covid is not new to us in the AR arena,” says Dawn Siebert, the senior science adviser for antibiotic resistance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
There are a number of reasons why AMR is on the rise: Antibiotics are overprescribed by doctors but are also ubiquitous in factory farming and even in some pesticides. A growing body of research suggests another reason: That climate change, rather than being a separate existential hazard to AMR, is intertwined, with AMR thriving as temperatures rise and resulting desertification…
