Space Daily via SPX: Using the same devious mechanism that enables some bacteria to shrug off powerful antibiotics, scientists have developed solar-powered nanofilters that remove antibiotics from the water in lakes and rivers twice as efficiently as the best existing technology.David Wendell and Vikram Kapoor explain that antibiotics from toilets and other sources find their way into lakes and rivers, with traces appearing in 80 percent of waterways. Those antibiotics foster emergence of new antibiotic-resistant bacteria, while harming beneficial microbes in ways that can degrade aquatic environments and food chains.
Filters containing activated carbon can remove antibiotics from effluent at municipal sewage treatment plants, before its release into waterways. But activated carbon is far from perfect. So the scientists looked for a better technology.
They describe development and successful laboratory testing of capsule-like "vesicles" containing the very mechanism that enables bacteria to survive doses of antibiotics. This system pumps antibiotics out of bacterial cells before any damage can occur...
Photo by Corpse Reviver, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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