Editorial: Special section of FEMS Microbiology Ecology on the environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance

Abstract

The emergence of multi-drug-resistant human pathogens increasingly threatens the successful treatment of bacterial infections, and is now widely regarded as a global public health crisis. Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem, and managing resistance will require global action. As a start, many nations are now developing action plans to mitigate the development of antibiotic resistance. These action plans generally have three pillars, innovation, surveillance and stewardship; and are founded on the One Health concept. Namely, that humans and animals (companion and food animal producing) are inextricably linked to each other through the environment. Thus, research on the environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance has become a priority, within the broader context of maintaining the efficacy of antibiotics of crucial importance to human and animal medicine. This FEMS Microbiology Ecology thematic topic concerns recent progress made in our understanding of the environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance, here coined with the acronym EDAR. Most of the manuscripts were contributed by participants of the Third International Symposium on the Environmental Dimension of Antibiotic Resistance, EDAR3, held in Wernigerode, Germany in May 2015. The EDAR3 meeting follows EDAR2 held in Xiamen China in December 2013, and the original EDAR meeting held in Montebello Canada in March 2012. The consensus statement formulated by the participants of EDAR3 was ‘there are linkages between environmental sources of antibiotic resistance and resistance in clinical pathogens, and human activity can increase, expand and mobilize environmental genes responsible for resistance’. For more detail on the status of progress in the field there are several recent reviews that will be of interest (Finley et al . 2013; Durso and Cook 2014; Jechalke et al . 2014; Berendonk et al . 2015; Huijbers et al . 2015; Nesme and Simonet 2015; Williams-Nguyen et al. 2016). Here, we briefly … [↵][1]* Corresponding author: E-mail: kornelia.smalla{at}julius-kuehn.de [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1