It seems to me that pouring water contaminated with antibiotics outside just makes wild bacteria resistant even without survival of pathogens or theoretically harmless wild bacteria who received genetic resistance during an interspecies exchange before the trip outdoors.
The idea seems to be that the wild things will metabolized residual antibiotics, without becoming resistant, or changing pathogenicity, or exchanging resistance among micro organisms. That’s not proven.

Besides, that we’re “conserving” water, but using it for ski resorts and golf courses in the southwest is totally and completely ridiculous in 2012.

Folks also claim – hey, they use this water on crops and on children’s playgrounds. Why aren’t ya’ll in an uproar over that? Well, I can tell you that an increasingly large number of people do have these concerns. And studies like the one mentioned in this article validate those concerns.

In the case of acinetobacter baumanni you have a bacteria ubiquitous in soils and ground water that is naturally resistant to most all antibiotics. While this may sound horrific the bacteria is really only a threat for the strongly immunocompromised and/or severely ill.

Which makes it a significant problem in hospitals, but a non-issue for otherwise healthy skiers, and just about everyone else – it better be, the bug is literally everywhere.

If organisms of no, or very limited, pathology were the source of the findings then the report is being used to generate a gross misperception of the potential risks associated with using treated effluent.

The study further notes that detection of antibiotic resistance genes increased between the point of treatment and point of use, and they speculate this is from biofilms developing in the delivery pipes. All of which would tend to indicate that these genes are coming from organisms already present at the point of use, ones that are merely taking advantage of the new moisture source.

While the initial study may have been performed with good intentions, it is hardly a complete picture of the situation. As used in the present article it isn’t science, this is politics masquerading as science.

Snowbowl tried for years to gain approval to build a reservoir for natural snow melt on the mountain, and the NIMBY/antis shot them down at every turn. Now they’ve come up with an alternate source of water and this effort strikes me as more of the same.

“We’ve got to figure out a better way to deal with recycled water than thinking that it is really recycled,” says Frank Pecarich, a soil scientist retired from the US Department of the Interior.

“One of the things some people say is that all water is recycled. This is true. The problem is, though, that it wasn’t going through a tertiary treatment plant, but Mother Nature’s system. The water we drink is filtered through the soil profile. “When you replace that with tertiary treatment you’re not replacing the water cycle; you’re just short-circuiting or short-cutting it and leaving out a tremendous bacteria-cleansing mechanism of the soil and the profiles of materials it must go through before it reaches the aquifer. There has been great success in getting recycled water to flow through bogs, marshes, and particularly sand to get fairly clean water, in effect letting the whole world of biology go to work for you.”

Read the whole article here: http://www.foresterpress.com/ow_0705_as.html

The real concern is that IF these reports DO prove that the wastewater has antibiotic-resistant ‘bugs’ then the city parks (which host many family picnics and events and are often very muddy due to rain plus sprinklers) have been sprayed with them for years. Where were the scare articles before snowmaking started making headlines?