In the case of a suspected anthrax attack, the United States Food and Drug Administration has a plan to immediately distribute stockpiled antibiotics to the affected population. If performed on a large scale, the amount of antibiotics entering wastewater treatment plants would quickly increase. This influx of drugs would likely be followed by unknown consequences to wastewater treatment plants, downstream ecology, and public health. We therefore investigated the influence of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin on bench scale activated sludge reactors. Reactor performance was unaffected regarding removal of total organics during 14 days of antibiotic loading; however, the reactor microbial community was affected immediately following ciprofloxacin-challenge. Aerobic colony-forming units were initially reduced at 24 h and then recovered after 72 h. Analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences demonstrated an increased relative abundance of Burkholderiales, Bradyrhizobiaceae, Microbacteriaceae, and Emticicia spp. In addition, ciprofloxacin decreased the Shannon's diversity index and community richness. Further, analysis of randomly selected bacterial isolates demonstrated that the prevalence of multidrug resistance increased in the ciprofloxacin-challenged reactors. These results suggest that an emergency response-associated loading of ciprofloxacin into municipal wastewater treatment plants could alter the activated sludge microbiome and select for multidrug-resistant bacteria.
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