Photo: Colourbox.dk

Join a WHO webinar on global disease surveillance

Food, fish and agriculture Food safety Bacteria and microorganisms Genes and genomes

Hear how analysis of sewage can be used to monitor the global occurrence of antimicrobial resistance and infectious diseases during a webinar on 26 March.

By analyzing sewage from 60 countries around the world, an international team of researchers—headed by the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark—has generated the first comparable global data thus mapping the levels of antimicrobial resistant bacteria that are present in mainly healthy people globally.

Presentations by two Professors 

At a webinar on 26 March, which is being organized by the World Health Organization, Professor Frank Aarestrup from the National Food Institute will talk about the idea behind the project and present the main results of the study, which has been published in the highly regarded scientific journal Nature Communications.

Next, Professor Marion Koopmans from Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands will explain how lessons learned in the project can be used to fulfill the research team's overall ambition of developing a worldwide surveillance system to monitor the occurrence and spread of disease-causing microorganisms and antimicrobial resistance.

The two Professors are co-coordinators of the EU project COMPARE, in which 28 European partners work together to speed up the detection of and response to disease outbreaks among humans and animals worldwide by using whole genome sequencing technologies.

Taking part in the webinar

The webinar takes place on Tuesday 26 March from 16-17.30. WHO have described on their website how you can get access to the webinar.

Read more

Read about the results from the sewage study in a press release from the National Food Institute: Sewage reveals levels of antimicrobial resistance worldwide and in an article in Nature Communications: Global monitoring of antimicrobial resistance based on metagenomics analyses of urban sewage

The study was funded through grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Velux Foundation, WHO and via the EU-funded project COMPARE. Several COMPARE partners participated in the study.

Read more about how the National Food Institute’s research in DNA sequencing techniques helps to establish international standards for the detection, monitoring and study of global spread of pathogenic microorganisms and antimicrobial resistant bacteria