Leibniz Research Alliance INFECTIONS in an Urbanizing World - Humans, Animals, Environments
Improved hygiene and better prevention and treatment have diminished the incidence of infectious diseases particularly in industrialised countries. However, increasing antibiotic resistance, emergence of new pathogens, together with changes in pathogen distribution due to altered climate and mobility are global challenges for humankind. The Leibniz Research Alliance (LRA) INFECTIONS aims to establish an interdisciplinary research agenda and opens up new avenues of communication across disciplines. New strategies and methods for early warning and outbreak management systems will be developed to control spread of pathogens.
NEWS
Air in livestock barns - a danger for animals and humans?
In the seed money project AirBarn, aerosols inside and from animal barns are investigated as a potential source for airborne pathogens. It is known that the use of antibiotics in agriculture often selects antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but the extent to which environmental influences can change the composition of bacteria in bioaerosols and where risks arise for humans and the environment are still open research questions.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR): Large-scale study provides comprehensive assessment of the global burden
A recent publication, which was published in The Lancet at the end of September, has analyzed the global burden of bacterial resistance on human health from 1990 to 2021 and calculated a forecast up to 2050 from this data. Three researchers from the Leibniz research network INFECTIONS contributed to this systematic analysis.
Accouncement: Webinar from our project partner ENVIRE
The ENVIRE project is an intervention study that aims to investigate the potential of various measures on the spread of antibiotic resistance in chicken farms and their surroundings. This experimental study, in which six working groups from Germany, France, Lithuania, Poland and Tunisia are pooling their expertise, aims to investigate whether and to what extent changes in husbandry, the way drugs are used or the storage and cleaning of manure and wastewater lead to a reduction in drug resistance and reduce the transmission of antibiotic resistance to humans in the environment.
