Are We Flushing Our Resistance to Antibiotics Down the Drain?
You may think the key to beating antibiotic resistance is for doctors to prescribe less and scientists to find new drug candidates. But the fundamental solutions may lie far from medicine. They may lie in managing our rivers and soils. Scientists who have uncovered antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in rivers and wastewater are now developing techniques to quantify the dangers.
One way in which antibiotic residues reach the environment is when people excrete them in their feces and urine, says Willem van Schaik, a
