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Drug-Resistant Superbugs May Be Growing Even Deadlier
New evidence suggests rising temperatures are giving drug-resistant pathogens an upper hand
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…
