Bugs in floods
Mark A. T. Blaskovich
A * and Patrick N. A. Harris B C
A
B
C
Prof. Mark Blaskovich is an ‘antibiotic hunter’ and Director of Translation for the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at The University of Queensland, as well as Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Environmental and Agricultural Solutions to Antimicrobial Resistance. A medicinal chemist with 15 years of industrial drug development experience that produced a clinical candidate, since 2010 he has been developing new antibiotics, non-antibiotic therapies and diagnostics to detect and treat resistant bacterial and fungal infections. He cofounded the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD), a global ‘crowdsourcing’ antibiotic discovery initiative that has collaborated with over 300 research groups, and has led multiple industry collaborations focused on antibiotic development. |
Dr Patrick Harris is the Acting Statewide Director of Microbiology at Pathology Queensland and UQ Amplify Fellow at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR) in Brisbane, Australia. He holds specialist accreditation in both infectious disease and clinical microbiology, and has worked in the UK, Malawi, Singapore and Australia. His research has a focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria and the use of randomised trials to define optimal management for ESBL- and AmpC-producing Enterobacterales, and was lead author for the influential MERINO trial published in JAMA in 2018. He has also been the clinical lead for the Queensland Genomics infection program, aiming to introduce the routine application of microbial genomics to infection control practice. |
Abstract
Floods are natural disasters that affect millions of people every year, with escalating impact due to a combination of factors that include increasing urbanisation of previously uninhabited land, deforestation, and climate change. Floods do not discriminate between lower–middle income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries, though the types of damage can differ. As a ‘fire or flood’ country, Australia is no exception. Apart from the obvious physical damage to infrastructure and direct impact on human health due to injury and drowning, there is a more insidious danger lurking in floodwaters – a range of microbial pathogens that can opportunistically cause additional morbidity and mortality. These health effects can be both acute, and longer term. This review focuses on bacterial infections that can be attributed to floods, divided into sections that summarise opportunistic infections by commonly seen human pathogens, versus infections caused by more unusual microbes that are normally not encountered until they are released by floods.
Keywords: Burkholderia, disaster management climate, flood pathogens, infectious disease, Leptospirosis, Vibrio.
Prof. Mark Blaskovich is an ‘antibiotic hunter’ and Director of Translation for the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at The University of Queensland, as well as Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Environmental and Agricultural Solutions to Antimicrobial Resistance. A medicinal chemist with 15 years of industrial drug development experience that produced a clinical candidate, since 2010 he has been developing new antibiotics, non-antibiotic therapies and diagnostics to detect and treat resistant bacterial and fungal infections. He cofounded the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD), a global ‘crowdsourcing’ antibiotic discovery initiative that has collaborated with over 300 research groups, and has led multiple industry collaborations focused on antibiotic development. |
Dr Patrick Harris is the Acting Statewide Director of Microbiology at Pathology Queensland and UQ Amplify Fellow at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR) in Brisbane, Australia. He holds specialist accreditation in both infectious disease and clinical microbiology, and has worked in the UK, Malawi, Singapore and Australia. His research has a focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria and the use of randomised trials to define optimal management for ESBL- and AmpC-producing Enterobacterales, and was lead author for the influential MERINO trial published in JAMA in 2018. He has also been the clinical lead for the Queensland Genomics infection program, aiming to introduce the routine application of microbial genomics to infection control practice. |
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