Rise of superbugs requires an urgent response

We might be on the cusp of a brand-new pandemic, Adam Hofmann says.

The scientific community has identified a manmade threat in our environment that just keeps getting bigger. And now, it looks likely that this issue may some day be responsible for the deaths of millions. No, I am not referring to climate change, but to drug-resistant superbugs caused by antimicrobial overuse.

Now, I don’t want to minimize climate change. Scientific consensus makes it clear that it is a catastrophe that could cause unprecedented mass migration, suffering and death.

But when I read alarming news stories about climate change, I take comfort in the theories about how we will survive it: that new land will open in Canada and Russia as permafrost melts, that some part of humanity will still be left to muddle on.

Superbugs are not likely to be so kind.

In 1918, the influenza pandemic known as the “Spanish Flu” rapidly infected nearly one-third of the world’s population, and killed an estimated 50 million people, predominantly younger people or those of working age. This flu followed on the footsteps of war, spread among soldiers crammed into transport ships, in a world with few doctors for the population size, relatively unarmed with public-health knowledge and lacking the antimicrobial medication we wield today.

Now, there is mounting evidence that we might be on the cusp of a brand-new pandemic of our own, one that may kill more people, one that we may not be able to stop.

The New York Times published some news recently which should be terrifying to anyone reading it, concerning Candida auris, a newly discovered deadly fungus that is drug-resistant.

Looking on the bright side, the potato crops are doing well. They are flourishing because we are liberally dusting them with a class of anti-fungal medication called azoles, commonly used to treat human fungal infections. In fact,

The fight for the future of human health is going to take more than just doctors.

this agricultural antifungal is now found in more than 12 per cent of all Dutch soil samples.

The overuse of antibacterial agents in meat, dairy, and poultry farming was declared in

2016 by the World Health Organization as likely responsible for the breeding of bacterial “superbugs,” so-called due to their capacity to resist multiple antibiotics. Now that we’re overusing these antibiotics at the scale of industrial farming, we are turning the fields that feed us into laboratories for breeding the superbugs that may one day kill us.

Ominously, even our old enemy, influenza, has become resistant to several classes of antiviral medications over the past few decades.

So, what can be done? Though the agricultural industry uses, and misuses, significantly more antimicrobial agents than do medical personnel, doctors need to step up and develop antimicrobial stewardship programs to help reduce the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, and stem the tide of superbugs.

The fight for the future of human health is going to take more than just doctors, however. Our various levels of provincial and federal governments have rightly adopted a wide-ranging and multi-pronged approach to tackling climate change. We need something just as ambitious for superbugs. In addition to reducing or eliminating the use of medically important antimicrobials in agriculture, we need the government and private-sector partners to take a proactive hand in fostering the research and development of new classes of antimicrobials and safeguarding their efficacy.

While there is little scientific consensus that organic food, grown without pesticides and antibiotics, is directly beneficial to our health, one thing seems certain: that avoiding antimicrobial use in agriculture will save our children from superbugs. Bigger turkeys and plumper potatoes hardly seem worth risking the potential death of multitudes.

Humans have proven resourceful and adaptable in our hundreds of thousands of years of existence. We have yet to face a threat that can adapt faster than we can and can follow us where ever we go, but the time seems to have come. The need for action is urgent.