Team:Peking R/HumanPractice/Investigation

Investigation of Antibiotic Use and

Related Biosafety Issues: What's

happening out there and further.

In order to investigate the extent to which laboratories understand biosafety issues

in regard to antibiotic use, we have carried out a survey involving about 150 participants (including researchers from laboratories in the College of Life sciences and College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering in Peking University, and employees at a few sequencing companies) who responded to a series of questions related with treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the laboratory. (For the majority of the participants, who are non-English speakers, a Chinese version of the questionnaire was provided so that difficulties in understanding survey questions were minimized.)
According to the responses given by the number of participants who have responded, it may be concluded that, in general, laboratory researchers are aware of potential safety issues related with the use of antibiotic and resistance genes, but the level of awareness is far from sufficient for restricting laboratory work in a way that minimizes possible hazards as a consequence of microbes’ antibiotic resistance.
The first few questions look into the extent to which antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) are employed in laboratory research. It may be seen that over eighty percent of laboratories use ARB for at least half of their experiments (Q2), and that approximately one fifth of them use bacteria with multi-antibiotic resistance (Q3). Therefore, there exists a large pool of antibiotic resistance that is foreseeable threats to the environment.
Question 2

Question 3

The next set of questions investigates whether used or unwanted ARB is appropriately processed in laboratories.

The respondents all showed adequate levels of understanding in issues concerning possible threats induced by abandoned ARB in the laboratory. Almost equal proportions of respondents pointed out one of the four major consequences, respectively(Q9). Unfortunately, statistics revealed that over one third of the respondents reported that used ARB is never or only occasionally processed in safe and professional ways, and that a considerable portion of them has no special attention paid to the issue (Q5). Besides, results for Question 6 indicated that very few (<3%) laboratory researchers have been clearly informed of how laboratory waste should be processed in their department/organization. Even if they have somehow been informed, they did not pay much attention because they believed that laboratory waste is being appropriately processed. It is interesting that though people know that something like this may have negative effect on our life, they believe that there will be someone else to be responsible for such things. To make matters worse, more than half of the laboratories directly dispose of materials that have been in direct contact with microbes, while some others care little about the matter (Q8). This further adds to the potential danger of pollution and transfer of antibiotic resistance to microbes in the environment. Thus it seems that what is more urgent is not informing researchers of potential safety hazards of ARB but how to strictly and effectively regulate laboratory procedures to prevent these hazards. Most researchers know the consequences of their behavior, but few would take the time and effort to implement the right measures, probably because public health and environment have not yet experienced crises of sufficiently alarming levels, which we strongly wish, of course, to avoid.