Antibiotic resistant bacteria can spread in an unexpected way — through clouds
Global News
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has made it increasingly challenging to effectively treat a growing number of bacterial infections.
Bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics can live on the surfaces of plants or within the soil, but they can also survive in clouds, meaning they can travel thousands of kilometres and potentially invade new environments, a recent study found.
Researchers from Université Laval in Quebec and Université Clermont Auvergne in France showed, for the first time, that bacteria carrying antibiotic-resistant genes can be harboured and carried in the atmosphere.
“Considering that the atmosphere is a system that is pretty harsh for the bacteria, (the number they found) is quite a lot, actually,” said Florent Rossi, first author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval’s Faculty of Science and Engineering.
Antimicrobial resistance genes are a naturally occurring phenomenon present everywhere in nature, he explained, adding the scientific community has known for a long time that these genes can exist in the air (which can be carried from the ground to the atmosphere by the wind).
However, “what we didn’t know is how high they can be and how far they can travel. And the fact that we found them in clouds highlights that they can travel for long distances,” Rossi stated.
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has made it increasingly challenging to effectively treat a growing number of bacterial infections, including pneumonia, tuberculosis and foodborne illnesses. This trend has resulted in longer hospitalizations, higher medical expenses and elevated mortality rates, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Antibiotic resistance has become so prevalent that the WHO has classified it as one of the 10 global public health threats facing humanity.
Because of its prevalence in nature, Rossi and his team wanted to understand how far antibacterial resistance genes can travel.
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