ABSTRACT
Contrasting with the minute quantities of antibiotics released by producing organisms, huge amounts of industrially-produced antibiotics have been released into the environment since the beginning of the “antibiotic era’’. This can go from the drugs excreted by medicated humans and other animals in their urine and feces, to the application of antibiotics upon trees and grasses, to the dumping of industrial by-products into water bodies. These and other variants will be discussed in this chapter. However, there is a long list of largely unknown or unquantified instances of environmental release of antibiotics, of which there is no available data, neither on their magnitude nor on their impact. Many of these have to do with the poor sanitary conditions and urban infrastructure, lack of regulatory and enforcement frameworks, and corruption, that are typical of non-developed countries. In fact, corruption and poor governance correlate much better to increased bacterial resistance amongst pathogens, than clinical antibiotic usage, at least in European countries (Collignon et al., 2015). Among the things that do happen, but that may or may not have an impact on the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance are, in the urban setting:
– The excretion of antibiotics by medicated humans and pets directly into the streets, by open urination and defecation.
