Shit as a Reservoir of Resistance: How Delayed Governance May Have Catalyzed the Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse

• In Event: Making Objectivity in Data-Centric Knowledge Practices

Abstract

The global emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most jarring manifestations of the Anthropocene. Antibiotics treating infectious diseases that were once fatal, have changed the world, saving millions of lives. Today, unregulated growth of corporatized industry under both war-time and neoliberal policy environments, as well as exceptionalism, have led to excessive and indiscriminant use of antimicrobials in households, medicine, and food and livestock production. As a result of these anthropogenic selection pressures, medically important microbes are evolving new biological characteristics that make them resistant to the effects of antimicrobials. To properly evaluate and respond to AMR, it is necessary to link its proliferation to neoliberal environmental regulations, acknowledge the limits of existing scientific investigation to quantify the “resistome”, and respond via swift, multi-scalar governance of human and animal wastes. In this paper, I draw on my training as a microbiologist and political ecologist to examine antimicrobials as sociocultural materials created to establish desired chemotherapeutic and ecological boundaries of health. I argue that ecologies and infrastructures containing animal and human wastes are essential points of AMR control, but should be embraced as ecological black boxes that belie measurement. Finally, bearing on the question of action and climate change, I address how making visible the political economy of AMR, waste and pollution becomes paramount, as flood waters may mobilize AMR beyond present containment systems, irreversibly spreading potentially untreatable infectious diseases into the broader environment and catalyzing epidemics beyond medical intervention

Author

• KD Brown, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill - Dept of Geography