A few years ago(LSS 10 1 24) we published a piece riffing on the twin dangers of antibiotic resistance and climate change coming together in a pincer movement and multiplying their lethal effects. Sad to say, our worst fears have been compounded by this excellent piece from the prescient Andrew Gregory in today’s Guardian. He cites a multinational study which suggests that there may indeed be a link of some kind [1] between these two perils.
“The bigger the study, the better it’ll be” has always been our motto. And this one is huge, running from 1940 to 2023, over 139 countries and 480 000 samples of Salmonella. To quote their key findings:
82% of countries studied had increases in antibiotic resistance genes in salmonella. The strongest climate-associated increases were found to be in the Middle East and north Africa, followed by south Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa
Better still, the authors are admirably cautious, making no grandiloquent claims about direct causes, but quietly pointing to a worrying correlation that is extremely hard to explain away.
And our guess is that it won’t go away, gentle readers. People, societies civilisations even usually manage to cope with one crisis at a time. Its when more than one comes along at once that their joint effects synergise uncontrollably (think Rome in the Third Century AD) and makes them impossible to control. Certainly, this is a warning which it would be better not to ignore.
#antibiotic resistance #global warming #climate change #evolution #genes #medicine #health #epidemics
Learning, Science and Society 