WATER MANAGERS HAVE A VITAL ROLE TO PLAY IN STEMMING ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE

摘要

The discovery of antibiotics revolutionised the fight against bacterial infections. However, every year more pathogens become resistant to one or more of these invaluable drugs leading to uncertainty in how infectious disease will be treated and controlled in the future. In the developed world, increasing resistance is usually attributed to poor antibiotic stewardship and inappropriate antibiotic use. However, growing evidence suggests antibiotic resistance transmission and dissemination also consequentially occurs with environmental pollution, particularly the release to water courses of untreated domestic wastewaters containing resistant bacteria and resistance genes. As such, until recently, the major role of the water environment in this critical global issue has been underappreciated (Graham et al, 2014).