Quantitative and qualitative impact of hospital effluent on dissemination of the integron pool.

ABSTRACT: There is increasing evidence that human activity, and especially the resulting effluent, has a major role in the dissemination of bacterial antibiotic-resistance determinants in the environment. Hospitals are the major antibiotic consumers and thus facilitate the spread of antibiotic resistance. Questions are increasingly being raised about the management of hospital effluents, but their involvement in antibiotic-resistance dissemination has never been assessed. Integrons are a paradigm of genetic transfer between the environmental resistome and both commensal and pathogenic bacteria. In order to assess the impact of hospital activities on antibiotic-resistance dissemination in the environment, we monitored integrons and their gene cassettes in hospital effluents, and their release in the

SUBMITTER: Stalder T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3960533 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature