“Traditionally and for good reason, public health experts have focused on clinical settings like hospitals and nursing homes, because that is where patients acquire resistant bacteria,” said Xu Li, the study’s principal investigator.
“Traditionally and for good reason, public health experts have focused on clinical settings like hospitals and nursing homes, because that is where patients acquire resistant bacteria,” said Xu Li, the study’s principal investigator. “Now we are seeing that the environment could also be a pathway where people acquire those resistant pathogens — and that is why the EPA is stepping in to look at that.”
Wastewater treatment plants are efficient in removing pollutants in domestic wastewater; however, they are also suspected to be a focal point for introducing antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and antimicrobial resistance genes into the environment via rivers and streams, said Li, who is the Dale Jacobson and Debra Leigh Professor of Environmental Engineering at Nebraska.
Resistant bacteria find their way into wastewater treatment plants, and in turn into rivers and streams, via household use of medications and cleaning products, as well as by discharge from hospitals and antimicrobial manufacturing plants. Antimicrobial bacteria and genes also could be carried into river water through runoff from cropland fertilized with livestock manure or biosolids from wastewater treatment plants.
Read more at: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Xu Li (front left), Bing Wang (front right), Shannon Bartelt-Hunt (back left) and Yusong Li (back right) collect and examine water samples from the Elkhorn River near Waterloo, Nebraska, as part of the EPA research project. )Photo Credit: Craig Chandler | University Communication and Marketing)
