Antibiotic Resistance. Not just Farmers.

Have you ever gotten irritated when your doctor won’t give you antibiotics? After all, you may reason, “Using these for farm animals is the real issue.” That has been the story in some places - farmers and pharmaceutical factories are the big problem, with human use being only a small part of it.

We tend to blame farmers for a lot of antibiotics getting into the environment and causing natural selection to create resistant organisms. This is part of the problem. Or sometimes we blame hospitals, where we sometimes see resistant organisms come to our notice. Factories are part of it also.

However, normal human use may be contributing much more than suspected according to a recent study. [1] Even when passing through wastewater treatment plants, household effluent seems to still contain enough antibiotics, to create selective pressure.

This latest study in PNAS Nexus, estimates global river contamination, and the study is the first to estimate the scale of global river contamination from 900 global rivers locations. The study was designed to isolate antibiotics from human use versus farms.

Perhaps, this highlights a need to find improvements for wastewater treatments or maybe at least quit blaming farmers and hospitals, when it’s a bigger problem than that.

References

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/05/250509132211.htm?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email