Analysis of Escherichia coli STs and resistance mechanisms in sewage from Islamabad, Pakistan indicates a difference in E. coli carriage types between South Asia and Europe.

Objectives: To discover the Escherichia coli STs and associated resistance mechanisms in the community in Islamabad, Pakistan by analysis of E. coli isolates in sewage. Methods: One hundred and ten E. coli were isolated from sewage across the city of Islamabad without antibiotic bias and confirmed as E. coli by MALDI-TOF MS. Isolates were characterized by fumC/fimH (CH) typing and core-genome MLST. Resistance mechanisms, virulence genes, phylotypes and plasmid incompatibility types were determined in a subset of isolates by in silico analysis. The genomic position of blaCTX-M-15 was determined using S1-PFGE, probing and Nanopore MinION sequencing. Results and conclusions: The most prevalent STs were ST394, ST10 and ST648, accounting for 39% of all isolates collected and were found at many sites across Islamabad. Carbapenemase genes were absent and only a single isolate of ST131 was found. The most prevalent resistance mechanisms were qnrS1 and blaCTX-M-15, with blaCTX-M-15 penetrating many STs and found in 31% of all collected isolates. However, the majority of the successful STs were blaCTX-M-15 negative indicating that resistance is not the main driver of prevalence. Twenty-three percent of blaCTX-M-15 genes were chromosomally encoded and large ISEcp1-mediated insertions included qnrS1 and several plasmid genes. In all chromosomally encoded isolates no plasmid copies of blaCTX-M-15 were found. The most prevalent ST (ST394) contained many enteroaggregative E. coli virulence genes and the fimH30 variant allele previously linked to the success of ST131.

Ecological footprint, globalization, and economic growth: evidence from Asia.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between environmental rationality and economic activities that accelerate environmental indicators in Asia. In the ecosphere, the environment is a predator of human consumption. The continent Asia holding more than 60% of the world's population is vulnerable to environmental deployment. The purpose of the study is to find the link between economic growth, globalization, biocapacity, energy intensity, and renewable energy to the ecological footprint (EFP) in Asian countries for the period of 1990-2017. For empirics, the econometric techniques applied are panel OLS, fixed effects, random effects, fully modified-OLS, DOLS, and generalized methods of moments techniques. The results prove that by increasing the share of renewable energy in total energy consumption the environmental quality is improved. The Pedroni cointegration test shows a long-term relationship exists between globalization, economic growth, and the environment. The results of all techniques show the similar effectiveness of all used economic indicators in the model that disturbs the environment with different intensities in each test. The results of FM-OLS show that with a 1% increase in economic growth, globalization, biocapacity, and population density the ecological footprint increases by 0.55%, 0.08%, 0.06%, and 0.03%, respectively. However, renewable energy improves the environment by 0.04%. The Granger causality analysis revealed a bidirectional causality between ecological footprint and globalization and between EFP and energy intensity. This study recommends that Asian countries should make sustainable environmental policies to protect the environment from further damage.