Travellers at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the Netherlands EschCollection/Getty ImagesPeople in the Netherlands who travel abroad are unknowingly contributing to the rise of antibiotic resistance by picking up gut bacteria containing drug-resistance genes while overseas then returning home. The team found that these travellers came back with gut microbiomes containing bacteria with many more and varied genes for antibiotic resistance than when they left. “My impression then was that there are a few resistance genes that are very widely circulating,” he says. There’s an entire arsenal of different resistance that you pick up during travel.”The presence of these resistance genes doesn’t pose a direct threat to travellers as long as they are healthy. “The longer the microbiome stays in that state, where they have acquired extra resistance genes, the more opportunity it has to spread,” says Bram van Bunnik at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Source: The North Africa Journal June 07, 2021 00:00 UTC