Air Pollution Is Making Infectious Diseases Deadlier, Study Finds

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential of new diseases to wreck our world has never been more clear—and so is the role that environmental changes play in exacerbating those new diseases. The connections between those factors is still an ongoing investigation, but the more we’re learning, the more we ought to be worried.

A new, first-of-its-kind global study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health suggests that antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacterial diseases may be linked to increases in air pollution—putting people all around the globe at risk of exposure to these infections. While decreasing air pollution could be a significant way to curb such strains from arising—but that will take concerted action among world governments.

“Antibiotic resistance and air pollution are each in their own right among the greatest threats to global health,” Hong Chen, a researcher at Zhejiang University in China and the lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “Until now, we didn’t have a clear picture of the possible links between the two, but this work suggests the benefits of controlling air pollution could be two-fold: not only will it reduce the harmful effects of poor air quality, it could also play a major role in combating the rise and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.