Review of Antimicrobial Resistance in the Environment and Its Relevance to Environmental Regulators

By A. Singer, H. Shaw, Vicki Rhodes, A. Hart. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2016

760 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The environment is increasingly being recognized for the role it might play in the global spread of clinically relevant antibiotic resistance. Environmental regulators monitor and control many of the pathways responsible for the release of resistance-driving chemicals into the environment (e.g., antimicrobials, metals, and biocides). Hence, environmental regulators should be contributing significantly to the development of global and national antimicrobial resistance (AMR) action plans. It is argued that the lack of environment-facing mitigation actions included in existing AMR action plans is likely a function of our poor fundamental understanding of many of the key issues. Here, we aim to present the problem with AMR in the environment through the lens of an environmental regulator, using the Environment Agency (England’s regulator) as an example from which parallels can be drawn globally. The issues that are pertinent to environmental regulators are drawn out to answer: What are the drivers and pathways of AMR? How do these relate to the normal work, powers and duties of environmental regulators? What are the knowledge gaps that hinder the delivery of environmental protection from AMR? We offer several thought experiments for how different mitigation strategies might proceed. We conclude that: (1) AMR Action Plans do not tackle all the potentially relevant pathways and drivers of AMR in the environment; and (2) AMR Action Plans are deficient partly because the science to inform policy is lacking and this needs to be addressed.

Subfields: Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Molecular Medicine, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19be3292c560d4664fe88cf96487c182aae6638e

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Citations in the corpus

• Antibiotic resistance: a rundown of a global crisis (2018, background): “Causes of the global resistome are overpopulation, enhanced global migration, increased use of antibiotics in clinics and animal production, selection pressure, poor sanitation, wildlife spread, and poor sewerage disposal system.(1,2) Antibiotic treatment is one of the main approaches of modern medi”
• Review of antibiotic resistance in China and its environment. (2018, neutral): “However, it is largely unknown the extent to which each one contributes to the ARGs/ARBs recovered in any particular location (Singer et al., 2016) Many studies focused on antibiotic resistance within Escherichia coli in the aquatic environment owing to its relevance to environmental standards and…”
• Antibiotic-Resistance Genes in Waste Water. (2017, background): “While hospitals contribute to the problems of ARB and ARGs, and they are considered as hotspots for the dissemination of ARB and ARGs, the actual evidence for their role is not strong [59].”
• Antibiotic Use in Agriculture and Its Consequential Resistance in Environmental Sources: Potential Public Health Implications (2018, background): “[40] accorded the administration of antibiotics in animal feed or water, in which the animals are reared in groups, making it difficult to isolate only the infected animals, as well as that the isolation process could be stressful to the animals and dangerous to the veterinarian who has to administe”
• Status of pathogens, antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotic residues in wastewater treatment systems (2017, background): “This increases the occurrence and the mix of multiple drug resistance in the microbial community (Singer et al. 2016; Szczepanowski et al. 2005; Xu et al. 2015).”