The large reservoir of antibiotic resistant bacteria in raw and treated water supplies is a matter of public health interest.
Currently, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring Systems, a collaborative effort of the Centers for Disease Control, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Food and Drug Administration, does not monitor antimicrobial resistance in surface waters. Recent studies have shown that the assumption that antibiotic resistant bacteria in surface waters are a result of human and animal fecal contamination is false; cultivable antibiotic resistant bacteria are not a subset of fecal bacteria.
Given the serious nature of antibiotic resistance in clinical settings, and the likelihood that antibiotic resistant bacteria can be transmitted to humans from large environmental reservoirs via drinking water, explanations for the distribution of antibiotic resistant bacteria and tools for studying this distribution must be found.
Results/Conclusions
Here we focus on mathematical modeling of bacteria in a river, which will be used to study the distribution of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment. We consider both antibiotic resistant and non-antibiotic resistant bacteria in the model, and, taking into account the strong correlation between land use and antibiotic resistant bacteria in rivers, we include a function for the influx of bacteria into the river from the shore. The model is shown to correspond well with data from the Mud River, WV.