Antibiotic resistance in wastewater: origins, fate, and risks

Antimicrobial resistance is increasing worldwide and threatens our capacity to treat infectious diseases. Recently, special attention has been given to the environment in the cycling of antibiotic resistance from and to humans. In urban areas, wastewater treatment plants represent a critical point of resistance propagation, since the discharge of domestic, hospital, and industrial effluents into municipal collectors mixes together human commensal, pathogenic, and environmental bacteria and high loads of antibiotic residues. Today we observe that wastewater bacteria have a high prevalence of resistance to antibio…