Kolkata: A recent study conducted by a team of researchers at Imperial College London has found that bacterial diversity has declined by 15% to 30% in areas that have suffered erosion caused by calamities across the world.
The study also estimates that global soil erosion could increase by 30%-66% by 2070.
The research finding has been published in “Journal of Hazardous Materials”. This indicates that antibiotic resistance can travel considerable distances through atmospheric and environmental pathways, even in areas with limited direct human activity, according to the researchers. The study, led by Bengal’s Arnab Majumdar, a professor of Imperial College London, claims that strains of bacteria, carrying antibiotic resistance genes, thrived at places, where the eroded soil accumulated. The study gains significance in the backdrop of the recent flash floods in Nepal. The study has cautioned that climate-driven soil erosion, landslides and flooding can transport the antibiotic resistance genes from remote mountain environments into rivers, agricultural fields and human settlements. The study was led by Majumdar of Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences, along with David R Johnson of Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and Stefan Kolb of Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany. Considering the possibilities of increase in global soil erosion, the researchers have called for an integrated One Health surveillance system linking environmental resistance reservoirs with infections detected in hospitals. They have proposed soil-transplant experiments across different elevations, landscape-connectivity models and systems that combine environmental and clinical data to better track the movement of resistance genes.