Recreational hot springs as environmental reservoir of potential multidrug-resistant pathogens

Abstract

The past decade of research on the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health has highlighted the importance of investigating and interpreting the spread of pathogens at the ecosystem level, in a “One Health” framework (Destoumieux-Garzón et al., 2018). The connection between environmental status and human health appears even stronger in the wake of the recent SARS-CoV2 pandemic, which likely emerged from human interactions with the environment and unsafe food handling (De Sadeleer and Godfroid, 2020). In this context, antibiotic resistance has become a serious problem in clinical settings (French, 2005), with the development of new multidrug resistance in several groups of pathogens representing a public health threat (Tanwar et al., 2014). According to the most recent Center for Disease Control (CDC) report, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur every year CDC 2019, 2023), with trends projected to increase for the next decade.