Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and spread is a global threat. In clinical settings, AMR infections are given a lot of attention because infections by drug resistant microorganisms often leads to failure of treatment and death. AMR is a natural phenomenon in microorganisms. However, increased anthropogenic activities due to industrial growth, economy growth, and easy access to health care (especially antibiotics), have accelerated AMR gain in microorganisms. Lots of microbial infections require antibiotic treatment. Lack of access to clean water, lack of sewage treatment and lack of supervised antibiotic use have resulted in selection of resistant microorganisms making the available antibiotics ineffective and treatment failure. Moreover, AMR infections cannot be contained locally or confined to a specific nation. AMR infections have no geographical boundaries, which is evident from emergence and spread of NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase) or colistin resistance.
Globally “One Health approach” is widely adopted for AMR with a focus to account health of people, animal and environment. In recent times, researchers in developed countries have started to research on methods to understand environment AMR, mitigate AMR gain and transfer contributed by different environment matrices. Sanitation, sewage treatment and lack of access to clean water are interlinked and are the major contributors of AMR infection. Wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) is an integral part of sanitation, which acts both as a reservoir of AMR components and bridge between the wastewater generated and environment matrices. WWTPs receive, accumulate, enrich and discharge AMR components such as antibiotics, ARB, and ARGs into environment matrices. Conventional tertiary treatment technologies viz; chlorination, UV treatment, ozonation, sand filtration, coagulation, and membrane filtration are not effective and efficient in removing low concentration pollutants such as antibiotics. On the other hand, reactivation of ARB is inevitable and removal of ARGs is not effective.
Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for effective removal of emerging contaminants are in recent trends. Electro-oxidation is one such AOP with a potential to address the four major components of AMR namely the antibiotics, non-resistant transformation compatible bacteria, ARB and ARGs. The pollutant removal is by insitu generated reactive oxygen species at the anode. The most investigated anode for pollutant removal is the boron doped diamond (BDD). However, the cost of BDD electrode makes it unreliable for large scale applications. A low cost electrode, which is equally efficient as BDD could be an alternate choice. Therefore, the research is aimed to develop a low cost anode for effective removal of the major components of AMR to mitigate the environmental spread. In this context, the objectives of the research are to synthesize and characterise a low cost electrode, optimise the anode for removal of antibiotics of different class, disinfect non-resistant and antibiotic resistant bacteria and degrade antibiotic resistance genes.