- During the conference held at the Parc Taulí University Hospital, experts in microbiology, hospital management and innovation debated the challenges and solutions to stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance in the healthcare field.
- The hospital will house a pioneering source purification system that will eliminate antibiotics and resistant bacteria and genes from the center's effluents
The European project LIFE GENESYS brought together experts in microbiology, hospital management and innovation at the Parc Taulí University Hospital last Friday to address the high presence of antibiotics in hospital wastewater, which favors the proliferation of bacteria and genes resistant to these drugs that are difficult to eliminate.
During the day, they discussed what the challenges in stopping the spread of antimicrobial resistance in the healthcare sector, and the GENESYS technology was presented, which will eliminate antibiotics, resistant bacteria and associated resistance genes in hospital wastewater at source, thus preventing them from reaching urban wastewater treatment plants.
Antimicrobial resistance, a holistic challenge
The hospital centers, places where antibiotics are widely used, are a outbreak of antimicrobial resistanceThese resistances pose a risk both to health, as they compromise the effectiveness of treatments, and to the environment, as they alter the normal functioning of ecosystems.
However, the Current European regulations do not require hospitals and healthcare centers to have a waste disposal system of antibiotics and bacteria and antimicrobial resistance genes. LIFE GENESYS wants to anticipate future legislation and propose systems that have the capacity to eliminate these compounds from the environment, in line with European guidelines and the One Health approach.
THEOne Health approach, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO), defends the interconnection between the health of people, animals and the environment, and consequently advocates addressing environmental and health challenges in a holistic and multisectoral manner.
In this way, Maite Martin, president of the One Health Platform and participating in the round table of the event, he highlighted: "antimicrobial resistance is still treated in a compartmentalized way. It is important that it is not only treated from a health perspective, but also from an environmental perspective."
LIFE GENESYS, a project at the forefront of the fight against antimicrobial resistance
The GENESYS technology, which will be implemented in the Parc Taulí University Hospital itself, combines advanced wastewater treatment, capable of eliminating more than 99% of resistant bacteria and associated resistance genes, with a digital toolThis tool will allow the hospital to monitor the presence of antibiotics and other drugs, as well as multi-resistant genes and bacteria, in hospital effluent and optimize its treatment.
To Blanca Peldigons, project manager and researcher at Cetaqua-Water Technology Center and coordinator of LIFE GENESYS, "this project will be a great step forward in terms of eliminating antimicrobial resistance, because it will demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of a technology that can be replicated in other hospital centers."
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