Are non-antibiotic drugs contributing to antimicrobial resistance?

Inspiration takes many forms. For Jianhua Guo, it was his friend’s daughter’s diarrhoea. Guo — an environmental microbiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia — was studying the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospital waste water. His research indicated that the resistance arises in response to not just antibiotics, but also other compounds that happen to have antibacterial properties. …