THE ''SUPERBUGS'' TAP : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

AS WEALTHIER COUNTRIES bomb poorer ones, devastating essential infrastructure, they have created the tragic social conditions that foster antibiotic resistance.

The public-health fallout knows no borders and can carry on indefinitely, even after the bombs stop.

HUMANS are host to more than a thousand species of bacteria, including many of the superbugs deemed critical threats by the World Health Organization.

But they rarely become pathogenic in healthy people. War changes that. It deprives people of food, clean water, and sanitary living conditions.

When bombs and bullets fly the resulting wounds become perforated with shrapnel, debris and soil teeming with microbes.

That injured and vulnerable often wind up in close and unclean quarters - packed transport buses and boats, refugee camps, overcrowded hospitals - that allow infection to fester and spread.

BY 2050 - The Lancet predicts that antimicrobial resistance will kill 8.22 million people per year, more than the number currently killed by cancer. And a growing body of research suggests that the 21st-century method warfare has become a major driver of that spread.

NATIONS of the Middle East now suffer from particularly high rates of multi-drug resistant pathogens, and some of the world's fearsome superbugs have incubated in the region - Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, E. coli, MRSA and perhaps most notably A. baumannii, a strain of Acinetobacter that traveled home with soldiers.

About a decade ago, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a Palestinian reconstructive plastic surgeon newly arrived at the American University of Beirut, presented another new hire - Omar Dewachi, an Iraqi anthropologist and former physician - with a medical mystery that he was observing in his clinic.

Abu Sittah had assembled some remarkable data : roughly 70 percent of his patients from Iraq and almost 80 percent from Syria had infections that were resistant to multiple drugs.

What was driving this startling rise in resistance?

This Master Global Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Francesca Mari From The Magazine.