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MRSA found in wastewater treatment plants

Just a short post here about a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Detected at Four U.S. Wastewater Treatment Plants”

Unlike some of the stories we rag on about potential pathogens in the built environment (things like “we found E. coli!”), there is a real concern about finding MRSA in this environment.   It’s not too surprising that they find it coming into the facilities, and encouragingly they detect less of it at each stage of the treatment process.   However, in one case they found it in the final treated water and that seems like a problem.

CDC-10046-MRSA
Image: By Janice Haney Carr, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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David Coil

David Coil is a Project Scientist in the lab of Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis. David works at the intersection between research, education, and outreach in the areas of the microbiology of the built environment, microbial ecology, and bacterial genomics. Twitter

One thought on “MRSA found in wastewater treatment plants

  1. What’s worse, only E. coli is normally tested as an indicator of microbial contaminants in the supply sent from public water treatment plants that supply drinking water to the vast majority of Americans.

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