Aircraft toilets could become a powerful early warning tool in the fight against antimicrobial resistant super-bugs, a growing health crisis that threatens to kill more people than cancer by 2050.

This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers who analyzed lavatory wastewater from 44 international flights arriving in Australia from nine different countries.

The findings are both alarming and promising. Using advanced molecular techniques, the researchers detected nine high-priority pathogens and super-bugs, including some that are acquired in hospitals and resistant to multiple drugs.

Five of the nine super-bugs were found in all 44 flight samples, and a gene conferring resistance to last-resort antibiotics was detected on 17 flights. This gene was absent in Australia's

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