Patricia Huijbers, Carl-Fredrik Flach and Joakim Larsson at CARe have published a conceptual framework for environmental surveillance of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance in the environment.
The authors define five distinct objectives with environmental surveillance, covering the protection of both human, animal and ecosystem health. Clarifying the objective of any surveillance or monitoring effort is important as different markers, such as the abundance of resistance genes, resistant bacteria and the levels of antibiotics, will not inform e.g. the risks for evolution of resistance in pathogens in the same way as it will inform the risks of transmission of already resistant pathogens. The authors therefore discuss the relevance of different markers as well as the choice of sampling sites for each objective. The proposed framework envisages integration of environmental, human and animal surveillance systems and is available as an open-access article in Environment International.
Huijbers PMC, Flach C-F, Larsson DGJ. (2019). A conceptual framework for the environmental surveillance of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Environ Int. 130:104480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.05.074