Superbugs plus climate change equals double trouble. Here’s why

What once was a medical miracle has become a nightmare. At aBhekisisawebinar, scientists discussed how changing climate conditions are helping the spread of germs, called bacteria, that antibiotics, which one of the experts at the online event called “the eureka of medicine”, can no longer kill. They’re calledsuperbugs, because they’re near impossible to kill with the medicines we’ve relied on for decades.

It’s a big problem. Astudy published inThe Lancetfound that in 2019, such drug-resistant infections killed 1.27-million people worldwide. In roughly the same period, global HIV-related deathswere estimated at around 718 000 a year.

In other words, infections caused by bacterial superbugs led to nearly twice as many deaths around the world as HIV. The germs are all around us, says Luther King Abia, an environmental microbiologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,during the webinar. Theycan causeuntreatable or difficult-to-treat throat, ear, chest (for instance, pneumonia and TB) and skin infections, as well as meningitis and cholera, and sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia, among other diseases.

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Changing weather patterns and more frequent and severe flooding as a result of it can make superbugsspread faster and further. We answer 11 questions, to make it easy to understand why. The term“superbugs”is often used to talk about germs like bacteria, viruses or fungi that can withstand drugs designed to kill or stop them from growing.

They cause infections that are almost impossible to cure with the medicine we have available. “These germs have become super powerful, because nothing can kill them,” says King. Like all living things, disease-causing bacteria try to protect themselves orfight back against threatssuch asantimicrobial drugs.

(Bacteria and other germs are calledmicrobesbecause they are so small that they can only be seen with a microscope or other imaging equipment; antimicrobial means something that works against microbes.) Over time, some bacteria have changed in ways that let them outsmart the medicines designed to kill them. Instead of dying out, they multiply. When this happens antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is said to have developed, which gives rise to superbugs.

AMR is mostly because of the overuse ofantibiotics, a group of antimicrobial drugsused to treat bacterial infections. The medicines becamewidely used in the mid-1940swhen scientists figured out how to make lots of an antibiotic called penicillin in labs. The discovery changed modern medicine because this antibiotic could kill many types of bacteria that used to cause deadly infections. The more we use antibiotics,the more chances we give bacteria to find ways to outsmart the medicine.

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