Wastewater Treatment Center

A new commentary by One Health Trust’s Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan and collaborators discusses the European Union’s recent proposal to amplify sewage surveillance efforts to monitor antimicrobial resistance in populous areas. The authors praise the new emphasis on sewage surveillance, a disease prevention method that has been used for decades against polio, but caution that the data should be collected intentionally to fill knowledge gaps. They recommend specifying objectives and defining endpoints in order to avoid gathering unactionable information and wasting limited resources. Furthermore, they suggest using a combination of cultivation (phenotypic), and cultivation-independent (gene-based) approaches to assess the resistance situation, given the varied pros and cons of each approach.

Find the commentary in Nature Reviews Microbiology, here.