Below is a transcript of our conversation with CMU Assistant Professor Dr. Maggie Williams and CMU Ph.D. student Yasna Mortezaei
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. In an earlier segment, we talked about antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment. It has been attributed to 5 million deaths worldwide, and that number could rise to 20 million by the year 2050. Dr. Maggie Williams from CMU’s School of Engineering and Technology worked with student Chris Haupt to identify the problem. PhD student Yasna Mortezaei is focused on how the problem can be treated. She and Dr. Williams joined me in studio…
Maggie Williams:
And so, we're trying to tackle this challenge to protect human health. My student Yasna, who's here today, is assessing how we can treat this problem. So currently antimicrobial resistance ends up in our wastewater, and so we have the capabilities to do something about this. So instead of just discharging it into the environment, we have treatment technologies that allow us to treat it before it gets discharged.
DN:
And Yasna, we welcome to you too. And do we have something similar when it comes to treatment with anything else that might be related to this or are you starting from scratch when it comes to looking at this particular antibiotic resistance when it comes to wastewater?
YM:
In fact, we have physical, chemical and biological treatment steps to treat the level of contamination to a level that nature can handle and in the biological step, we have an aerobic digestion process that microorganisms are involved in this process and this process is a potential solution to reduce the level of antibiotic resistance genes.
DN:
Are there conditions or circumstances that have made the overall situation for lack of a better word, worse today, more challenging today than it has been?
YM:
Yeah, definitely. So, in the past, the antibiotic resistance genes problem has been limited only in the hospital. But now we are finding increasingly antibiotic resistance everywhere, like in childcare centers, in universities and our sport fields, in water bodies. And the main reason for all these antibiotic resistance things is wastewater treatment plant.
DN:
And Doctor Williams, then, is there a goal of a model that could address perhaps this specifically? And would that then potentially lead to to this model being applied to the other places where we fins the (the) problem that Yasna was mentioning, childcare centers and (and) so on and so forth?
MW:
When we determine what these operational parameters are, we publish this information with the hope that it gets incorporated by other treatment facilities for removal of antimicrobial resistance.
DN:
Do we have a sense that there could be a change in behavior or a change in chemicals that we use or whatever the case may be that there might be something that could lead somewhat to a solution?
MW:
Absolutely. So, this is a very interesting problem in that it actually spans disciplines, right? And so, from the healthcare side of things, there's a big push on something called antimicrobial stewardship. And so, this is for healthcare providers prescribing only the antibiotics that are actually needed, educating patients on how they can utilize the full course of antibiotics etcetera. And so, from the healthcare side of things, we're trying to reduce the problem in that way. We, as environmental engineers, are trying to say OK on our side of things we deal with where they end up and they end up in the wastewater treatment facility. So how can we then remove them to prevent and minimize risks to the general public? And so, it's (it's) a very interesting problem to have in that it spans all of these different areas.
YM:
And we have learned that the presence of other pollutants in the environment, like the microplastics like PFAS, like the heavy metals and many and many other pollutants that we have in the environment, they all increasing the antibiotic resistance.
DN:
Thank you to you Yasna Mortezaei, and to you, Dr. Maggie Williams, from the School of Engineering and Technology. Well done to both of you. And thank you both very much for coming in. To talk with us.
MW:
Thank you so much.
YM:
Thank you.
