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Health

Surfers may be swallowing bacteria and spreading it to others

By Andy Coghlan

14 January 2018

A surfer

Catching a wave – and something else?

Description:Steve Woods Photography/Getty

Surfers seem to be gulping down antibiotic resistant superbugs in seawater, and may unwittingly be spreading them to people they know.

Resistant bacteria pose what the UK’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, last year described as an by making it impossible to cure simple infections with standard antibiotics. In 2013, the US Centers for Disease Control warned that each year, 23,000 Americans die from untreatable infections, and 2 million are infected with increasingly resistant superbugs.

To see if contaminated seawater might be putting surfers…

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