Birds near urban areas affected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria – Technologist

Birds and humans sometimes share more than we think. Such is the case with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An international study published on Tuesday, August 13 in the journal Current Biology illustrates the impact of anthropogenic activities on the spread of pathogens in wild bird populations. It shows that species living close to humans are at greater risk of carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria than those more accustomed to rural areas.

“Most likely, wild birds acquire these resistant strains when exposed to environments contaminated by human activities, such as sewage or waste storage sites,” said Evangelos Mourkas, a Postdoctoral Researcher from Oxford University’s Department of Biology in the UK and José Valdebenito out of the Bird Ecology Lab at Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, co-authors of the study.

They fear that these birds could serve as a reservoir for antibiotic-resistant bacteria with a “risk of transmission to humans, as observed with other pathogens such as influenza viruses.”

“These bacteria have no impact on the health of birds, but they can be a real problem for humans,” said Thierry Boulinier, CNRS Research Director at the Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (Center for Functional and Evolutionary Environmentalism) in Montpellier, who was not involved in the study. “This means that these birds are sentinels: They reveal problems and draw our attention to the fact that the human population’s hold on the environment is increasingly enormous,” added the environmentalist.

Here, the researchers focused their analysis on Campylobacter jejuni, a bacterium naturally present in the gut microbiota of many species, including wild birds. To understand the impact of urbanization – as well as other factors such as type of diet (carnivorous, herbivorous or omnivorous), habitat (terrestrial or aquatic) and social organization (colonial or solitary) – on the risk of acquiring resistant bacteria, they examined cloacal samples (where feces are stored) from 30 bird species with contrasting lifestyles (ducks, corvids, waders, blackbirds, penguins, etc.), in eight different countries.

‘Acting on transmission’

Of the 700 birds analyzed, almost 20% carried bacterial strains with resistance mutations to at least one antibiotic, some of which, like fluoroquinolones, are considered of critical importance for human medicine. At the same time, using real data, the researchers were able to “accurately measure the proximity of bird populations to human populations.”

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