Antibiotics and Ecological Disruption: Exploring Alternative Approaches

Introduction

The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1929 is regarded as one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century. By preventing hazardous bacteria from producing their cell walls, penicillin was able to stop contagious infections like Staphylococcus aureus, which was a major cause of death in European hospitals at the time (Klein et al., 2018). The discovery of antibiotics had a major impact on the modern pharmaceutical business, which saw the commercialization of over 160 new antibiotics and semi-synthetic derivative compounds between the 1940s and the early 1970s. These compounds subsequently became essential for treating infectious infections (Van Boeckel et al., 2015). However, despite significant progress in lowering mortality and morbidity from common illnesses, bacteria that could tolerate or resist antibiotics' effects were soon discovered in lab settings, and soon after that, in the practice of medicine. One of the most urgent public health issues today is the emergence of microbial infections that can withstand antibiotic treatments. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 25,000 people in Europe pass away directly from drug-resistant bacterial illnesses each year, while new estimates from the British government point to a mortality rate of 500,000 people globally (Henriksson et al., 2018). The cost of treating antibiotic-resistant diseases is predicted to cost the USA alone $35 billion annually, placing a huge financial burden on world economies. To make matters worse, technological and financial difficulties have caused a fall in the rate of antibiotic discovery during the past few decades, resulting in a “antibiotic crisis” (Henriksson et al., 2018). World leaders were prompted to demand an urgent decline in antibiotic use as a result of this prognosis.

However, over the past few decades, both the use of antibiotics in human treatment and in other commercial activity has progressively increased on a global scale. For instance, it was estimated that 63,151 tons of antibiotics were consumed by livestock in 2010 and that this number will rise by a further 67% by 2030 (Rizzo et al., 2013). Aquaculture, the food industry with the highest growth globally because of intensive production, is also using more antibiotics. For this reason, man-made settings like sewage and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) increasingly include significant amounts of antibiotics with pharmaceutical origins. Furthermore, antibiotic compounds are becoming more common in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats as a result of inadequate local and international regulation of antibiotic pollution (Boy-Roura et al., 2018).

With regard to the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance as well as the immediate impression of antibiotics as environmental contaminants, we seek to explore the effects and causes of the occurrence of antibiotics in the environment in this review. In the first section, we describe the development of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and bacteria that carry these genes in various situations. Then, we list some significant ARG and ARB transmission vectors. In the second section, we go over potential impacts of antibiotic pollution on endemic microbial communities as well as higher organisms in various habitats, independent of the evolution of resistance (Rizzo et al., 2013). In order to limit the spread of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance in the environment and to draw attention to inadequacies in present legislation, we conclude this study with a section describing international policy initiatives.