Abstract:Alexander Fleming's discovery of a fungus producing penicillin more than 80 years ago has been regarded as a major breakthrough in medical science in human history. Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology was awarded three times to those who discovered novel antibiotics. Antibiotics have been widely used not only in human beings but also in animals for growth promotion and infectious disease control. Antibiotic resistance is defined as the microbial ability to sustain and multiply in the presence of antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is ancient and ubiquitous in environmental microbes, particularly soils where many antibiotics have been discovered so far, and this original resistance is viewed as intrinsic resistance. Nevertheless, the intensive use of anti-biotics in humans and animals have undoubtedly increased the emergence and abundance of antibiotic resistance in the environment, and therefore threatening global human health. Overall, there are three mechanisms that enable the microbes to resist antibiotics:( 1)efflux pumps;(2)deactivation or degradation of antibiotics;(3)protection of targets in bacterial cells. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the use of antibiotics and residual discharge into the environment is well correlated with the abundance of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance can spread via not only vertical gene transfer but also horizontal gene transfer(HGT), and eventually to human pathogens, and even the emergence of superbugs. In 2006 Pruden et al. explicitly proposed antibiotic resistance as emerging contaminants, and pointed out that conventional environmental treatment systems were not designed to remove these emerging contaminants. In order to combat global antibiotic resistance, we must take the following actions and measures:(1)to establish global management system to regulate the use and discharge of antibiotics;(2) to develop rapid and transparent global surveillance system on antibiotic resistance, covering clinical environments, animals farms and urban wastewater treatment facilities;(3)to set up global innovation fund for new drug development and intellectual property protection system so that drug develop is sustainable;(4)to strengthen fundamental and applied research on environmental antibiotic resistance, including the emergence and spread of resistance, mitigation technologies and solutions, such as advanced water treatment technologies to reduce resistant bacteria in effluent;(5)and to improve public awareness of antibiotic resistance, therefore control the misuse of antibiotics in agricultural and medical industries and environmental pollution from the root cause.