Pollution Potentially Linked to Antibiotic Resistance

Pollution is the price we pay for our industrialized world. And it’s all around us. Inevitable and pervasive. From the smog in our air to the toxic runoff polluting our water, there’s no escaping it anymore. And the health effects can be dire, with air pollution alone believed to contribute to 4.2 million deaths across the world each year. Now, researchers are discovering another deadly side effect, and it could mean antibiotic resistance on a massive scale. Learn how.

The Dicsovery of Another Potential Cause of Antibiotic Resistance

Researchers from the University of Georgia Research Foundation recently published an article that highlights a whole new path to antibiotic resistance—and it really left us surprised. The group studied contaminated soil beside the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where pollution is a known problem. They took samples from four different named locations along the river, each with a different type of soil condition:

• Upper Three Runs had relatively clean soil. 
• Ash Basins was contaminated with heavy metals.
• Pond B had the presence of radionuclides.
• Tim’s Branch had both heavy metals and radionuclides.

The team found vast variations in the strains of bacteria naturally living between each location, with the heavily polluted samples having far smaller variety and numbers of these important bacteria. Which is bad enough but then it got worse.

The bacteria that did persist had developed genetic changes to resist various toxic heavy metals caused by the pollution. Those same bacteria also appeared to have developed resistance to multiple antibiotics, even though they’d never been exposed.

More research will be necessary to determine the connection between heavy metal survival in bacteria and antibiotic resistance, but the running theory is that they think it may be a coincidental overlap. The mutations bacteria make to resist various heavy metals might also be the same ones that allow them to resist different antibiotics—so it's a correlation, perhaps, and not a causation but the result may be the same nonetheless. It could very well be that polluting our earth and water might be creating bacteria that resist antibiotics, contributing to an already challenging problem in our healcare system. 

Pollution Potentially Linked to Antibiotic Resistance

With industrial pollution being a problem all over, we could see even more increases in antibiotic resistance in the years to come as a result of this potential link. Far too many strains have already picked up resistance due to antibiotic abuse, and the effects are already devastating enough.

The CDC reports that 35,000 US residents die each year due to antibiotic-resistant infections. Now that we know microbes have other ways of increasing their resilience, we need to come up with creative new ways to slow the damage. But it does offer incentive, we hope, to do more work around cleaning up the environment and stopping environmental pollution in its tracks.

The effects of pollution are wide-ranging, and we’ve likely only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the impact which we tend to rationalize as being more removed than it probably is. With antibiotic resistance also a potential effect, it past time to really get serious about how we treat our environment. If we can’t, or won't, we might find our future plagued with a whole new host of untreatable and deadly infections the likes of which we haven't even started to imagine.

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