Surveillance for Emerging Antimicrobial Resistance through Characterization of the uncharted Environmental Resistome
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Environment
Surveillance
Transmission
- Johan Bengtsson-Palme, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden (Coordinator)
- Thomas Berendonk, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany (Partner)
- Sofia Forslund, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Germany (Partner)
- Etienne Ruppé, Université Paris Cité, France (Partner)
- Luis Pedro Coelho, Queensland University of Technology, Australia (Partner)
- Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi, Plateau State University, Bokkos, Nigeria (Observer)
- Rabaab Zahra, Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan (Observer)
Antibiotic resistance is threatening to kill millions of people every year in just a couple of decades and is already jeopardizing previously routine medical procedures, such as surgery and cancer treatment. A major problem in stopping the increasing resistance is that we don’t know what the new forms of resistance that emerge in bacteria look like. Therefore, we cannot use surveillance methods to identify them in the places where we typically try to find resistant bacteria of concern, such as in clinics, in animals, in sewage or in the environment. In this project, we want to create a system to detect these new types of resistance before they become a big problem in healthcare settings. To do this, we have come up with a set of methods to identify such new forms of resistance in environmental bacteria, which we will refine and utilize in this project. After identifying these novel forms of resistance, we can determine the risk that they spread from harmless environmental bacteria to the bacteria that cause diseases in humans and animals. We will also look for these new forms of resistance in settings where humans come into contact with bacteria from the environment and from animals, to see if there are particular environments where the risks for spread are high. All of this information will be used to create a system for surveillance of novel forms of resistance in clinics, animals, sewage and the environment, allowing us to prevent or delay their spread into bacteria that cause human diseases.