Impact of an urban effluent on antibiotic resistance of riverine Enterobacteriaceae and Aeromonas spp.

In order to evaluate the impact of an urban effluent on antibiotic resistance of freshwater bacterial populations, water samples were collected from the Arga river (Spain), upstream and downstream from the wastewater discharge of the city of Pamplona. Strains of Enterobacteriaceae (representative of the human and animal commensal flora) (110 isolates) and Aeromonas (typically waterborne bacteria) (118 isolates) were selected for antibiotic susceptibility testing. Most of the Aeromonas strains (72%) and many of the Enterobacteriaceae (20%) were resistant to nalidixic acid. Singly nalidixic acid-resistant strains were frequent regardless of the sampling site for Aeromonas, whereas they were more common upstream from the discharge for enterobacteria. The most common resistances to antibiotics other than quinolones were to tetracycline (24.3%) and beta-lactams (20.5%) for Enterobacteriaceae and to tetracycline (27.5%) and co-trimoxazole (26.6%) for Aeromonas. The rates of these antibiotic resistances increased downstream from the discharge at similar degrees for the two bacterial groups; it remained at high levels for enterobacteria but decreased along the 30-km study zone for Aeromonas. Genetic analysis of representative strains demonstrated that these resistances were mostly (enterobacteria) or exclusively (Aeromonas) chromosomally mediated. Moreover, a reference strain of Aeromonas caviae (CIP 7616) could not be transformed with conjugative R plasmids of enterobacteria. Thus, the urban effluent resulted in an increase of the rates of resistance to antibiotics other than quinolones in the riverine bacterial populations, despite limited genetic exchanges between enterobacteria and Aeromonas. Quinolone resistance probably was selected by heavy antibiotic discharges of unknown origin upstream from the urban effluent.