Link Between Increases in Local Temperature and Antibiotic Resistance

Not surprisingly, when looking at antibiotic prescription rates across geographic areas, the team found that increased prescribing was associated with increased antibiotic resistance across all the pathogens that they investigated. But then, after adjusting for prescriptions rates and other factors, when the team mapped out the latitude coordinates and mean and median local temperatures of their data points, they found that higher local average minimum temperatures correlated strongly with antibiotic resistance. Local average minimum temperature increases of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) were associated with 4.2, 2.2 and 3.6 percent increases in antibiotic resistant strains of E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and S. aureus, respectively. More unsettling still were some newly-discovered associations with population density. The team found that an increase of 10,000 people per square mile was associated with three and six percent respective increases in antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative E. coli and K. pneumoniae. In contrast, population density did not appear to significantly affect the antibiotic resistance of Gram- positive S. aureus. “Population growth and increases in temperature and antibiotic resistance are three phenomena that we know are currently happening on our planet,” says the study’s co-senior author Mauricio Santillana, PhD, who is a faculty member in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s and an assistant professor at HMS. “But until now, hypotheses about how these phenomena relate to each other have been sparse. We need to continue bringing multidisciplinary teams together to study antibiotic resistance in comparison to the backdrop of population and environmental changes.” MacFadden says transmission factors are of particular interest for further scientific research. “As transmission of antibiotic resistant organisms increases from one host to another, so does the opportunity for ongoing evolutionary selection of resistance due to antibiotic use,” MacFadden says. “We hypothesize that temperature and population density could act to facilitate transmission and thus increases in antibiotic resistance.” https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/news/link-between-increases-in-local-temperature-and-antibiotic-resistance-303200?utm_campaign=Newsletter_TN_BreakingScienceNews&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=63149617&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--oGfqwh54ZpdTylLMUcxcXOEzj0Q4terpUYIZsY07vtuV9CcHRizVyl-eKE6VkRbSDmSWLKVaWq7hutnas0OBGyrUT1Q&_hsmi=63149617