http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/world/asia/beijing-smog-antibiotic-resistant.html
Reports that Beijing’s already notorious smog contained bacteria with antibiotic-resistant genes spread through the city last week like pathogens in a pandemic disaster movie.
“Drug-resistant bacteria make people very afraid,” The Beijing Evening News said in an article reposted by Xinhua, the state news agency, as news of a scientific study by Swedish researchers spread during yet another flare-up of hazardous smog.
That was an understatement.
The actress Zhang Ziyi perhaps best summed up the feelings among many of Beijing’s 22 million residents by writing on her Weibo account on Saturday that the smog made her want to pick up her 11-month-old daughter and fly away. Ms. Zhang worried that it “made it easier to get sick.”
By Monday, most Chinese news reports speculating about the threat had been taken offline, replaced by articles quoting an unnamed expert from the city’s Health Department advising: Nothing to worry about.
By midweek, People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, had also concluded the fear was unfounded, citing an author of the study, whom it misidentified as Joseph J. Larson (in fact, Joakim Larsson), at the Center for Antibiotic Resistance Research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The study said “very little if anything about risks for acquiring an infection from breathing urban air,” Mr. Larsson, professor of environmental pharmacology at the university’s Sahlgrenska Academy and director of its Center for Antibiotic Resistance Research, wrote in an email responding to a request for comment.
In the report, the researchers studied different locations around the world for antibiotic-resistant genes, including the human gut, the skin, wastewater, soil, pharmaceutically polluted sites, and, in an apparent innovation, Beijing smog.
In what they described as “a limited set of deeply sequenced air samples from a Beijing smog event,” they identified about 64 types of antibiotic-resistant genes, making Beijing smog one of two environments with “the largest relative abundance and/or diversity” of antibiotic-resistant genes, including genes with resistance to last-resort antibiotics. The other, already known, is environments polluted by pharmaceutical factories.
Heavy smog is predicted again in Beijing for three days, starting on Friday.
