Flying Fungus and Bacteria Can Travel 1,200 Miles in the Sky

If you think you’ll be safe from germs in the sky, think again. Research by a team led by Xavier Rodó at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health found that microorganisms like bacteria and fungi can be carried by winds for over 1,200 miles while 10,000 feet in the air.

A third of the identified microbes are pathogens that can cause disease—and the ones with antibiotic resistance brought that with them. That’s a huge risk, since they can spread antibiotic-resistant genes to new environments.

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Some of this is not new though. We’ve known that dust from one continent can spread to another across an ocean. What makes this study such a big deal is that now we know even smaller particles that could potentially cause an illness to spread from one nation to another are moving around up there, too.

They found all this out by collecting samples in the sky over Japan. They found 266 types of fungi and 305 types of bacteria, totaling around 2,000 species. Trace compounds and air flight patterns suggested that all those microbes originally came from Northeast Asia and traveled 1,200 miles into the air over Japan. And when they took a look at what was going on on the ground, they found those same microbes had floated down there, too.

The researchers were sure to note that they aren’t saying deadly diseases are riding the jet stream and are here on vacation from a far-off land to kill us all. “We are not saying that epidemics will be seeded from distant places,” Rodó told Popular Science. A lot more research has to be conducted to find out the concentrations of these pathogens and the impact they have on our health if any at all.