FT Article - Climate change risks fuelling antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’
Series 8
Financial Time Articles with the theme: Health
1. Climate change risks fuelling antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’
Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” are among the greatest public health threats of our age — and researchers fear that climate change will make them still more dangerous.
Higher temperatures, more flooding, rising pollution, and growing population
crowding are all forecast to stoke bacterial resilience to existing drugs.
These problems add urgency to international efforts to tackle antimicrobial
resistance (AMR) by developing new medicines, and by blocking the pathways through which pathogen immunity spreads. They also mean climate change will loom large when governments gather on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, in September, to discuss ways to combat AMR.
“There are currently no good estimates of how much worse climate-related
disasters will make the burden of resistance — but it is clear that the risks are very large,” says Anthony McDonnell, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think-tank. “This area requires far more research to enable us to determine the tools needed to deal with this worrying inevitably.”
AMR refers to changes in bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites over time, as they evolve to develop resistance to the existing drugs used to tackle them. While the evolution itself is a natural response, it is accelerated by the extra exposure pathogens receive to medicines used too frequently or carelessly.
AMR contributed to almost 5mn deaths globally in 2019 and was directly
responsible for more than a quarter of them, according to a 2022 study. It could result in $1tn extra annual healthcare costs by 2050 and $1tn to $3.4tn gross domestic product losses per year by 2030, the World Bank has estimated.
“The climate crisis has numerous impacts on ecosystems, human health, animal health and food production, which also affect AMR,” according to a report titled “Bracing for Superbugs” published last year by the UN Environment Programme.
AMR is most harmful in lower- and middle-income countries that are more
vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as flooding. Anti-microbial
resistance to enteric fever — the waterborne disease also known as typhoid — has risen over the past 30 years in 75 countries in which it is endemic, according to a study published in The Lancet Global Health journal in February.
The results showed how rising resistance was a “pressing public health issue, jeopardising our ability to treat enteric fever effectively”, said Annie Browne, a spatial modeller and the lead author, on the study’s publication.