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Surfers seem to be gulping down antibiotic resistant superbugs in seawater, and may unwittingly be spreading them to people they know.
Resistant bacteria pose what the UK’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, last year described as an “apocalyptic threat” by making it impossible to cure simple infections with standard antibiotics. In 2013, the US Centers for Disease Control warned that each year, 23,000 Americans die from untreatable infections, and 2 million are infected with increasingly resistant superbugs.
To see if contaminated seawater might be putting surfers at risk, Anne Leonard of the University of Exeter, UK, and her team examined the stools of 143 local surfers and 130 sea-swimmers. They found E. coli bacteria that was resistant to the antibiotic cefotaxime in samples from nearly a tenth of the surfers, but in only 3 per cent