Faecal pollution promotes the environmental spread of AMR in Central Thailand

We want to strongly commend the manuscript Environmental antimicrobial resistance is associated with faecal pollution in Central Thailand’s coastal aquaculture region recently released in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. It is from a very interesting project led by Professor David Werner, Newcastle University, which studied the main drivers of environmental AMR spread in Central Thailand using HT-qPCR and MinION NGS. The work was in collaboration with partners at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand and the Institute of Urban Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Graham Group contributed to the analysis and interpretation of AR gene data on the aquaculture ponds and local rivers, which corroborated that polluted rivers were contaminating the ponds, not the other way around. See more about on the clean water research being done by Professor Werner’s team on their blog. Additionally, see the Newcastle University’s press release about the work here.