Strategy to develop and validate digital droplet PCR methods for global antimicrobial resistance wastewater surveillance.

According to World Health Organization (WHO), antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is currently one of the world's top 10 health threats, causing infections to become difficult or impossible to treat, increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability, and death. Accurate surveillance is a key component in the fight against AMR. Wastewater is progressively becoming a new player in AMR surveillance, with the promise of a cost-effective real-time tracking of global AMR profiles in specific regions.

Retrospective surveillance of viable group contaminations in commercial food and feed vitamin B products sold on the Belgian market using whole-genome sequencing.

is a spore-forming bacterium that occurs as a contaminant in food and feed, occasionally resulting in food poisoning through the production of various toxins. In this study, we retrospectively characterized viable () isolates originating from commercial vitamin B feed and food additives collected between 2016 and 2022 by the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain from products sold on the Belgian market. In total, 75 collected product samples were cultured on a general medium and, in case of bacterial growth, two isolates per product sample were collected and characterized using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and subsequently characterized in terms of sequence type (ST), virulence gene profile, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) gene profile, plasmid content, and phylogenomic relationships.