Wastewater surveillance of community-wide antimicrobials usage

Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern: University of Bath (Bath, UK)

The year 2020 witnessed a crisis in healthcare systems due to the COVID19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 has had an unprecedented impact on humanity globally. It exposed the acute inability to manage the virus due to lack of reliable surveillance systems focussed on rapid identification of SARS-CoV-2 hotspots. Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) has since enabled SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. Post-COVID applications will include the development of big data driven WBE systems for other biological and chemical threats. Mass spectrometry will play critical role in identification and quantification of biomarkers informing environmental and public health. This talk will introduce rapid advances of WBE, especially in the context of chemical exposure. It will focus on WBE-based estimation of antimicrobial agents’ usage in communities, triangulated with prescription data and AMR indicators (ARGs- antibiotic resistance genes). This will be done to asses if impact from antimicrobials’ usage on community’s AMR.