Wastewater-Based Epidemiology and Clinical Surveillance for Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an emerging threat to human and animal health. Antibiograms are used to make treatment decisions and identify public health concerns, but without data from the non-clinical community. The research team intends to create wastewater antibiograms for timely AMR surveillance, integrated with clinical antibiograms to improve clinical decision making.

The creation of wastewater antibiograms will provide more timely surveillance for AMR emergence, as well as provide a new value-added product for the wastewater industry to produce with existing data. In addition, the development of methods to integrate wastewater and clinical antibiograms will improve both public health and clinical decision making. This project entails a partnership between wastewater control agencies, public health, and academics.