Evaluating the Impact of Climate Change on Antimicrobial Resistance and Rise in Dysentery Using Next Generation Sequencing Based Approaches

Climate change, typically manifesting itself in the form of rising global temperature and frequently occurring drastic weather phenomena, has become the new norm for the twenty-first century. Incidence of infectious diseases like dysentery together with the evolution and spread of multi-drug resistant pathogens, appear as the two most vulnerable aspects of the ongoing climate crisis. The altered climatic conditions, can influence a myriad of events, from pathogen replication and survival to accelerating the exchange of resistant genes between microbes, thereby amplifying the occurrence of food and water borne infections and simultaneously lowering the efficacy of available antibiotics. The need of the hour is to develop and standardize rapid in situ detection methods which will enable us to estimate the extent of pathogenic microbes in a particular site effectively. Use of short read and long read sequencing methods coupled with standard culture dependent paradigms offers us a very rapid protocol for evaluating disease burden and estimating the abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG’S). This chapter highlights the impact of the effects of individual climatic determinants, like, temperature, relative humidity, droughts, floods, etc., on the magnitude and frequency of dysentery occurrence and emergence of resistant strains and provides a detailed methodology of microbial monitoring from environmental niches using next generation sequencing based techniques.