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Is Sewage Treatment Arming New Forms of Super-Bacteria?

Most likely, yes.
​Image: Les Chatfield/Flickr

​This is the argument being made this weekend at the ​249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society: the chlorine (usually) used in treating wastewater may be encouraging the formation of new, so-far unknown antibiotics. These antibiotics are then leaking into water supplies where they foster the development of new microbe-resistant strains of bacteria, diminishing the effects of our current arsenal of antibiotics. Which was already looking sketchy enough.

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So, it's not some big secret that pharmaceuticals are making their way into aquatic ecosystems and causing all sorts of problems, from the basic fucking up of fish lifestyles to, indeed, antibiotic resistance up here on dry land. This is a bit different, however. The antibiotics being introduced are in a sense new or at least significantly tweaked. It's sort of like offering harmful bacteria a antibiotic sneak preview.

This insight comes courtesy of Olya Keen, an environmental engineering professor at the University of North Carolina, and her team of graduate researchers. In laboratory experiments, the group took the common antibiotic doxycycline and exposed it to wastewater chlorine, observing any changes in the compound's antibiotic properties.

Indeed, that was what Keen and co. observed: super-doxycycline. "Surprisingly, we found that the products formed in the lab sample were even stronger antibiotics than doxycycline, the parent and starting compound," she offered in an ACS statement.

Surprisingly, we found that the products formed in the lab sample were even stronger antibiotics than doxycycline.

The mechanisms behind these "transformation compounds" are still vague, as is what they even are. They could be entirely new antibiotics, or just upgraded versions.

The whole water treatment process is one of harm reduction, not harm elimination. Chlorine is already known to result in a number of ​not-so-great byproducts (disinfection byproducts, properly) and, as Keen herself ​demonstrated in a 2014 study, the same holds true for UV treatment followed by chlorine treatment, a more recent, more advanced process in part designed to handle pharmaceuticals and "personal care products." Still, the effects can be minimized and drug disposal is a persistent problem, in which old and disused pharmaceuticals often wind up in the toilet or drain (don't do that).

Treated water is one of the very definitions of the developed world and, make no mistake, we don't want the alternatives: cholera, typhoid, fucking worms, cyclosporiasis, Legionnaires' disease, etc. The antiseptic world gets a lot of shit, often for good reason, but the alternative isn't a pretty place. Still, we have the luxury of doing disinfection better and clearly the need is there.

That's just a harder problem than it might've first seemed.