Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate her Department has made of trends in the level of the spread of superbugs into water courses from farms in the last 12 months.

A cross-departmental project called Pathogen Surveillance in Agriculture, Food and the Environment (PATH-SAFE) was established in 2021. It brings together the Food Standards Agency, Food Standards Scotland, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Environment Agency, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) to understand how pathogens and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is spread. PATH-SAFE contains a workstream focused on AMR prevalence in three river catchments and this work will strengthen our understanding of AMR in the environment, including the relative importance of different sources, transmission routes and, the implications are for people, animals, food and ecosystems. This will enable us to increase public awareness and inform effective control measures to protect human and animal health and the ecosystem, through a better understanding of the transmission pathway by which resistance develops and  spreads.

The Environment Agency (EA) have also been working with water companies on chemicals investigations which have included a range of pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines discharged from treated sewage effluent. The system allows the EA to sift and to screen any chemical substance nominated using, where available, hazard data and environmental monitoring data to prioritise whether a substance may be a possible chemical of concern in England. Many pharmaceuticals are included on this list. Monitoring also takes place for a wide range of pharmaceuticals within the water environment using a semi-quantitative screening methodology.

Background to the work can be found in Antimicrobial resistance surveillance pilot site selection and data-base extension - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) and Framework for understanding environmental antimicrobial resistance in England - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).