With several paranoia gripping us and with abundant things to worry about I don’t want to add to your woes and worries.
A recent article by Hartmann et al [1] show that common antimicrobial chemicals used in the in building material and prevalent in building materials and personal care products such as triclosan, a commonly used antimicrobial, found in soaps, shampoos can promote the development of resistance itself. The authors say that “This study is the first to report a relationship between antibiotic resistance genes and antimicrobial chemicals in the indoor environment.”
Let me break it down for you. “Antimicrobial” means any substance that kills the bacteria. “Antimicrobial resistance”, occurs when bacteria living in these substances that kill them find a way to survive as they were not subjected to a dose that can kill them and then propagate only later not to be killed by the available drugs.
Such a scenario where an individual is infected by one of these “resistant”, hard to kill bugs poses a great threat to human health. We generally use a lot of these chemicals in our daily use and these generally accumulate in waste water, where these bacteria also accumulate and thus are subjected to such levels of these bug killing substances.
Increasingly scientist have found these chemicals now seeping into drinking water, which can be harmful.
What they did:
They collected dust samples from mixed-use athletic (gyms, sports center etc.) and educational facility and analysed it for the “anti-microbial resistance genes”-- the important things in the bug ( a part of it’s DNA) that impart it the ability to make proteins required to fight/ neutralize the substance and survive in the dust.
What they Found:
The authors say : “Our observations are correlative and do not give evidence of a causal relationship between the presence of antimicrobial chemicals in dust and an increase in antibiotic resistance genes in the dust microbiome.”
Meaning : That they could find that first indoor dust has the chemicals such as triclosan present in them . Secondly they also found the parts of the DNA (“genes”) that can make proteins that can fight these chemicals and this survive in the dust and capable of infecting humans/us, which can be troublesome as this “hard to kill” bug can make you sick and be a serious problem.
What does that mean :
The research shows that the dust in the house has chemicals that give rise to “hard to kill” bugs and can be problematic to us in due course.
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