Hospital Effluents: a Health Monitoring Tool in the Era of Multi-resistance

Plain-language summary

Bacterial antibiotic resistance (AMR) is at the heart of public health concerns, with multi- and highly antibiotic-resistant bacteria (MDRO) responsible for difficult-to-treat infections. These bacteria include extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL-E) and carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (EPC). One axis of the fight against AMR is the surveillance of the dissemination of MDROs, particularly in health facilities. This currently involves individual screening of patients, using a rectal swab, a method that has limitations in terms of cost and acceptability. In this context, wastewater monitoring has been proposed as a proxy for patient colonization, offering a simple-to-implement, ethically acceptable, inexpensive, and reproducible alternative. This approach could be particularly relevant in contexts where human sampling is difficult to carry out, such as nursing homes or prisons. It can also help identify the emergence of new resistance and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions by hospital hygiene teams. A growing number of studies are looking at the role of effluents in the spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria, but this work is usually carried out on a large scale, covering entire hospitals or urban areas6. This approach, while relevant to a global vision, limits the ability to establish direct links between human colonization and environmental contamination. The ROSEAU project takes advantage of the unique location of the Infectious and Tropical Diseases Building of Bichat Hospital, which benefits from an individual effluent network, thus providing an opportunity to establish a direct link between bacterial colonization of wastewater and that of patients. If such a correlation is demonstrated, resistance monitoring in wastewater could be a reliable proxy for human colonization, thus representing an alternative to individual sampling.

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