Opinion: Gaza, Ukraine, and other conflicts could be accelerating antibiotic resistance
Military conflict can drastically accelerate the emergence and spread of drug-resistant bugs.
In recent months, evidence suggests, the war in Ukraine and the ongoing conflict in Gaza have led to spikes of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. This is to be expected; conflicts often create conditions that are perfect for drug resistance to emerge and spread, with the first evidence of this dating back as far as the 1940s.
What is particularly worrisome about this is that the number of conflicts across the globe is at an historical high, and on the rise. This suggests that, even with nearly 5 million deaths a year now associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR), we may have drastically underestimated the true scale of this escalating global crisis — it may be spreading even faster than we realized.
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