Antibiotic “resistomes” in non-healthcare environments: An understudied phenomenon in Brunei Darussalam

Abstract

The issue of antibiotic resistance is still present today and poses a global threat to the community. The golden age of antibiotics has long passed since the novel discovery of penicillin in 1929. With time, bacteria have grown to become more sophisticated, building up resistance to many antimicrobial drugs and transferring genes between humans, animals, other bacterial species and the environment. The ever-mounting frequency of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic, commensal, and environmental bacteria to a variety of different clinically useful antibiotics, such as vancomycin, methicillin and penicillin, has become a worldwide public health threat. The rapid evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has greatly outpaced the development of novel and effective antibiotic treatments and management strategies. Thus many common infectious diseases caused by bacteria, which were once easily treatable with antibiotics, have now become more difficult or near impossible to treat and are a leading cause of deaths throughout the world due to antibiotic resistance. Discovery of new antimicrobial drugs has been posed as a worldwide importance in dealing with the ever-growing issue of drug resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).