The fate of Antimicrobial's in urban wastewater and its role in the development of antimicrobial resistance.

Antimicrobials have revolutionised medical care in the twentieth century. However the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an increasingly serious threat to global health care and it requires a multidisciplinary response to understand how to tackle AMR. In response to this threat to global health care The World Health Organisation has issued a global action plan on antimicrobial resistance.
This project aims to understand the fate and biological effects of antimicrobial agents and co-selecting biocides in the urban environment and the impact these process might have on the development of AMR. The project with focus on the aqueous environment in particular urban wastewater and the wastewater process as water is a well-known dissemination route for the distribution of both antibiotics and microorganism in the environment.
The project is inherently interdisciplinary and will combine expertise from environmental and analytical chemistry in conjunction with microbiology and water science while utilising cutting-edge bio-analytical approaches. Considering the importance that building a great understanding of the environmental impact of antimicrobial agents has on our understanding as to how AMR is selected for and transferred across microbial populations this project has the potential to lead to ground-breaking research with a long term scientific and social impact. It is therefore important to look at this project from with both an environmental and clinical perspective.
In the future stricter regulations of antibiotics in the environment are envisaged. The European Commission has recently proposed the inclusion of antibiotics on the Water List under the Water Framework Directive and the UK Water Utility companies have an active Chemicals Investigation Programme (CIP2) to quantify the environmental inputs of selected antimicrobials from wastewater outfalls across the UK. A full understanding of the fate of antibiotics and the selection for resistance in wastewater is therefore considered as a key priority.