London’s public spaces are rife with multidrug-resistant bacteria

Multidrug-resistant bacteria are dotted throughout London. From swabs taken across the city, nearly half of the samples with a common type of bacteria had a drug resistant strain.

Hermine Mkrtchyan at the University of East London and her colleagues swabbed commonly touched surfaces around the city, including door handles, stair handrails and taps in shopping centres and train stations. They also took swabs in public areas of hospitals, such as reception areas and lifts.

They tested the swabs for the presence of staphylococci, a group of bacteria that can cause antibiotic-resistant infections such as MRSA in hospitals. Out of 182 swabs from public spaces containing staphylococci, the team found 40.7 per cent were resistant to more than one antibiotic. And out of 418 swabs from hospitals containing the bacteria, 49.5 per cent were multidrug-resistant.

“Finding such high levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the general public settings is a worrisome finding,” says Mkrtchyan.

Most of the bacteria identified aren’t usually pathogenic, but some are opportunistic, meaning they may cause infections in some cases, such as in people with weakened immune systems.

Genetic tests found a large diversity of genes in the bacteria that confer resistance to different antibiotics. Bacteria can exchange genes with one another, so it is possible for these genes to spread to human pathogens and create new strains that cause hard-to-treat infections.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria existed long before humans developed antibiotics, but the overuse of these drugs has created the evolutionary conditions for them to become much more prevalent. They are now considered a global epidemic, present in such unlikely places as penguins’ guts in Antarctica.