The Associated Press has been riding US water companies and public utilities in the last year or so for allowing measurable amounts of drugs to get into streams and lakes and, often, back into the drinking supply (earlier post). Today the AP’s Margie Mason reports from India a region that makes US’s drug-polluted waters look like spring rain carried in by a squall fresh from the wide ocean (well, not really, but lots cleaner anyway). One authority told her that if one bathed in the waters near India’s largest concentration of pharmaceutical factories, “then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment. If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you’re treated for everything.” That looks like hyperbole. The “gasps of water” line is a good combo. It also is difficult to imagine a brew better suited for mass provocation of bacteria to evolve resistance to these drugs. Any wildlife left in such waterways surely are suffering, the study suggests. The effluent from one factory, she reports, contains enough of just one powerful antibiotic to treat 90,000 people. It and several other drugs were found to be in the discharged blechh at the highest levels ever measured for pharmaceuticals in a waste stream.

AP is not the first news outlet on the scene. The site, at an industrial zone in the town of Patancheru, judging from hits with search engines, has been regarded by environmentalists and other activists for some time as a disaster. The pic is from a greenpeace site. Here is a story from more than three years ago in The Hindu.
It is a bit difficult to tell the exact source of the specific news but Mason apparently showed enterprise and sewed it together from medical conference presentations and, presumably, plenty of phone calls. The primary source is a researcher in Sweden, but where and in what form the findings have been published or peer reviewed is not clear.  One quote The Tracker would have elided as overkill: “The water in a river in India could be the rain coming down in your town in a few weeks.” Exactly. The water there might be just a smidgen of it here. But not the gunk left behind by the evaporation, surely.

-CP

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.