When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Antibiotics powerful enough to treat every person in a city of 90,000 was being dumped into one stream each day.
And it's not just ciprofloxacin. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating 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.
It is the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.
Those factories, located close to Hyderabad, produce drugs for much of the world. The result: Some of state'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, a German expert on drug resistance in the environment. "If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you're treated for everything. The question is -- for how long?"
"We don't have any other source, so we're drinking it," said R Durgamma, a mother of four, sitting on the steps of her mud house a few miles downstream from the treatment plant here.
Slow | POISON
Toxic Mess | About 90 drug factories in Patancheru, 28km from Hyderabad, have been spewing their drug residues since 1980s. Today, its water is the most polluted in the world — even after treatment, it's 100 to 30,000 times the levels considered safe
The Result | A few gulps of water can combat many diseases, but causes drug resistance in people. Higher incidence of cancer already noticed. Other biological aberrations anticipated. The water here eventually flows into Godavari — so affected area could be much larger
Who's Responsible? The factories, of course. But these factories supply generics to US & Europe where strictest waste treatment is enforced in factories. So, are we killing our environment for the wellbeing of the West?
Drug traces in Patancheru wells
Patancheru has become a hub for largely unregulated chemical and drug factories in the 1980s, creating what is described locally as an “ecological sacrifice zone” with its waste. Since then, India has become one of the world’s leading exporters of pharmaceuticals, and the US which spent $1.4 billion on Indian-made drugs in 2007, is its largest customer.
Last year, it was reported that trace pharmaceuticals concentration had been found in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans. But the wastewater downstream from the Patancheru plants contained 150 times more than those detected in the US.
Some locals long believed drugs were seeping into their drinking water, and new data from the study by Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has confirmed their suspicions. Ciprofloxacin, the antibiotic, and the popular antihistamine cetirizine had the highest levels in the wells of six villages tested. Both drugs measured far below a human dose, but the results were still alarming.
The consequences of the studies in India are worrisome.
Researchers are finding that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain pharmaceuticals.
Some waterborne drugs also promote antibiotic-resistant germs, especially when, as in India, they are at times mixed with bacteria in human sewage.
The discovery of this contamination raises two key issues for researchers and policy-makers: the amount of pollution and its source. Experts say one of the biggest concerns for humans is whether the discharge from the wastewater treatment facility is spawning drug resistance.
“Environmental protections are being met at Patancheru,’’ says Rajeshwar Tiwari, member secretary, AP Pollution Control Board. And while he says regulations have tightened since Larsson’s initial research, screening for pharmaceutical residue at the end of the treatment process is not required.
Possibly complicating the situation, Larsson’s team also found high drug concentration levels in lakes upstream from the treatment plant, indicating potential illegal dumping — an issue both Indian pollution officials and the drug industry acknowledge has been a past problem, but one they say is practised much less now.
“I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen concentrations this high before. And they definitely ... are having some biological impact, at least in the effluent,” said Dan Schlenk, an ecotoxicologist from the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the India research.
And even though the levels recently found in village wells were much lower than the wastewater readings, someone drinking regularly from the worst-affected reservoirs would receive more than two full doses of an antihistamine in a year.
M Narayana Reddy, president of India’s Bulk Drug Manufacturers Association, disputes Larsson’s initial results: “I have challenged it,” he said. “It is the wrong information provided by some research person.”
Reddy acknowledged the region was polluted, but said that the contamination came from untreated human excrement and past industry abuses. AP
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