New York subway stations full of drug-resistant bacteria: Study

New York, Feb 6
Forget the five-million plus commuters and untold number of rats, the New York City subway system is harbouring drug-resistant bacteria, a team of high school students here has discovered.

Swabbing in five subway stations by Anya Dunaif, a participant in Rockefeller University's summer science research programme, and her team found that the bacteria is impervious to two major antibiotics.

"Although I knew resistance is considered a serious threat to modern medicine, I went into this project not certain what to expect. I was not even sure we would see antibiotic-resistant bacteria, let alone multi-drug resistant bacteria," Dunaif, senior at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, explained.

Now we hope to build off the work I did over the summer by searching for more types of antibiotic resistance in more stations, she added.

With help from fellow high school students, Dunaif collected the bacteria on swabs and tested to see if they would grow in Petri dishes containing three commonly used antibiotics.

Bacteria from five of the 18 swabs she tested grew in spite of the presence of either ampicillin or kanamycin, and in one case, both.

None of the cultured bacteria appeared resistant to the third antibiotic, chloramphenicol.

The samples she collected and cultured in five stations were a component of a city-scale environmental DNA sampling effort led by Chris Mason, assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College with support from Rockefeller's science outreach programme.

The project called Pathomap seeks to profile the city's microbial community while also capturing DNA from other organisms.

In addition to antibiotic-resistance, Pathomap's surveys also turned up fragments of DNA that correspond to well-known disease causing microbes, including plague and anthrax bacteria.

However, the authors note, microbes that left behind this DNA did not appear to be causing widespread disease, instead they may simply represent normal inhabitants of urban infrastructure.

The project's initial results were described in a paper published in the journal Cell Systems.