World's highest drug levels entering India stream

[Liberal_in_LA]

World's highest drug levels entering India stream

World's highest drug levels entering India stream

By MARGIE MASON, AP Medical Writer Margie Mason, Ap Medical Writer – 19 mins agoPATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn't just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India's poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

"If you take a bath there, then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment," said chemist Klaus Kuemmerer at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany, an expert on drug resistance in the environment who did not participate in the research. "If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you're treated for everything. The question is for how long?"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090125/ap_on_re_as/pharmawater_india

[lapfog_1]

1. And any bacteria that survives in that water? - n/t

[jpak]

2. Antibiotics would select for resistant strains and result in drug resistant bacteria

A very bad business model for that antibiotic...

[bahrbearian]

3. Don't give them any Ideas

They'll start selling it a Health Drink.

[leftstreet]

4. Why hasn't some Capitalist entrepreneur turned this into a Spa?!

:sarcasm:

[eShirl]

5. "If you take a bath there, then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment,"

Ahhh, the healing waters....

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. As American health care costs rocket out of control a trip to India might be needed.

[varun]

7. Holy waters of Ganges...

this stream must rival that

[tavalon]

8. Well, we can add that one to the spinning wheel labeled:

What will take down man?

[populistdriven]

9. Patamcheru area known to be a problem since at least 1997

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h63v724554237521/