Monitoring methods and hospital environments

This month we will have the fourth and final webinar in Resistomap’s Autumn 2021 series on the science and application of antibiotic resistance monitoring. We have addressed some very important questions in our webinar series so far, raised by both our guest speakers and the audience. In this webinar, we will explore two of the reoccurring questions in past webinars, namely the threshold, or monitoring baseline, for the presence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and the topic of hospital environments and their significance in the spread of antibiotic resistance in the environment.

Our first guest speaker is Johan Bengtsson-Palme, who is the coordinator of the EMBARK project. EMBARK is a project working on establishing a baseline for antimicrobial resistance in key environments. Having a baseline for measuring ARG is a huge step in the fight to protect our healthcare. It could provide the context needed to enable policymakers to take proactive measures to discover potential outbreaks before it is too late.
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Following this, our second speaker Jesse Majlander will present Resistomap’s project on monitoring hospital wastewater. In this project we used ResistApp -- our very own digital monitoring tool that combines high-throughput quantitative PCR (HT-qPCR) with automated data analysis – to study the dynamics of ARG profiles in wastewater from two hospitals in Helsinki, Finland. 
Similar to our previous webinars, the presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion with questions from the audience.

Speakers

Johan Bengtsson-Palme

University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Johan Bengtsson-Palme is an Assistant Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He does research in the fields of microbiology and microbial ecology, specifically targeting antibiotic resistance, pathogenesis, and interactions in bacterial communities through large-scale experimental work, metagenomics, and bioinformatics. He is the coordinator of the EMBARK Project, which works towards establishing a monitoring baseline for antimicrobial resistance in key environments. 

Jesse Majlander

Resistomap, Finland

Jesse Majlander has a master's degree in microbiology and microbial biotechnology from the University of Helsinki. He has worked with environmental antimicrobial resistance for over 5 years and before that organised free-for-all events to generate awareness on all aspects of AMR. Jesse is the chairperson of the NGO One Health Finland and has been working with Resistomap for almost two years, first as an R&D Scientist and for the past year as an Operations Manager.