Antibiotic resistance in tap water during the summer season – preliminary research

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance of bacteria is regarded as a global health risk and should be monitored in all environments, including tap water distribution systems. In this study, tap water samples were collected from two water treatment plants and selected points-of-use from the water distribution network. The abundances of antibiotic resistant bacteria were determined via culture-dependent method and the presence of selected antibiotic resistance genes was detected via PCR. The influence of the distance of points-of-use from water treatment plants on bacterial loads and antibiotic resistance phenomenon was evaluated. The paper presents preliminary results of a large-scale study concerning spatial and seasonal variation in antibiotic resistance of bacteria dwelling in the tap water system in Wrocław.

Spatiotemporal Changes of Antibiotic Resistance and Bacterial Communities in Drinking Water Distribution System in Wrocław, Poland

“…The occurrence of ARB and ARGs in tap water has been reported worldwide, as well as in DWDS in Wrocław [7,9,18,25,26,[30][31][32]36,37,39,40,42,43,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. To the authors' best knowledge, however, this is the first study characterizing spatiotemporal changes in ARB, ARGs, and bacterial communities in bulk water samples collected from a full-scale DWDS in East-Central Europe.…”

“…Many studies to date have aimed to detect ARB in drinking water [7,30,32,36,37,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60], and several of them failed to isolate resistant bacteria from tap water samples [41,44]. Nevertheless, antibiotic resistant Staphylococci, Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas, Sphingomonadaceae, and Acinetobacter were found in tap water in Europe [42,43,45,49,50,[58][59][60], and antibiotic resistant Escherichia coli in Asia [36,56,57], for example.…”

“…A previous study [54] presented preliminary results of analyses of samples collected during the summer sampling campaign (July and August 2018). In this study, these samples were further investigated, and samples from the same points were collected during the winter sampling campaign (January and February 2019) in accordance with identical collection and research procedures.…”

“…DNA was extracted from membranes by means of a DNeasy PowerWater kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany) in accordance with manufacturers' instructions. DNA eluates from samples collected in July and August were pooled to prepare a representative sample for the summer season [54], whereas DNA eluates from samples collected in January and February were pooled to prepare a representative sample for the winter season. As a result, each DNA sample was prepared from up to 20 L of tap water for each sampling point.…”

“…Figure 2.Comparison of relative abundances of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the summer[54] (a) and winter (b) season in consecutive points. NG refers to water treatment plant Na Grobli, MD refers to water treatment plant Mokry Dwór, numbers refer to sampling points, S refers to summer, and W refers to winter.…”