NIAID - E.coli Bacteria - http://bit.ly/2tgHQjU

AWARE-WWTP

My PhD research project is related to antibiotic resistance in employees from wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). Antibiotic resistance is the scariest threat of modern medicine. Antibiotics have existed for less than 100 years, and resistance rates are already alarmingly high. This happens because bacteria are incredibly effective at coming up with and trasmitting antibiotic resistance genes. This process gets exacerbated when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics but do not die completely. An important carrier of antibiotic residuals and resistance genes is water, and WWTPs are known hotspots for these residuals.

Therefore, we’ve developed a consortium of four countries: Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, and Sweden. We want to determine: * Whether or not there is a higher prevalence of resistant species and resistant genes in WWTPs * Whether or not the risk increases with closeness to the plants

The project only started on June 1st 2017, but we have been working on it since earlier this year (2017).