Big Pharma’s Pollution Is Creating Deadly Superbugs While the World Looks the Other Way | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/environment/pollution-creating-deadly-superbugs
Voyage au bout de l’enfer : quand la pharmacie devient une industrie polluante, le danger finit par devenir plus grand à terme que les avantage maintenant.
Industrial pollution from Indian pharmaceutical companies making medicines for nearly all the world’s major drug companies is fuelling the creation of deadly superbugs, suggests new research. Global health authorities have no regulations in place to stop this happening.
A major study published today in the prestigious scientific journal Infection found “excessively high” levels of antibiotic and antifungal drug residue in water sources in and around a major drug production hub in the Indian city of Hyderabad, as well as high levels of bacteria and fungi resistant to those drugs. Scientists told the Bureau the quantities found meant they believe the drug residues must have originated from pharmaceutical factories.
The presence of drug residues in the natural environment allows the microbes living there to build up resistance to the ingredients in the medicines that are supposed to kill them, turning them into what we call superbugs. The resistant microbes travel easily and have multiplied in huge numbers all over the world, creating a grave public health emergency that is already thought to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year.
A group of scientists based at the University of Leipzig worked with German journalists to take an in-depth look at pharmaceutical pollution in Hyderabad, where 50% of India’s drug exports are produced. A fifth of the world’s generic drugs are produced in India, with factories based in Hyderabad supplying Big Pharma and public health authorities like World Health Organisation with millions of tons of antibiotics and antifungals each year.
The researchers tested 28 water samples in and around the Patancheru-Bollaram Industrial zone on the outskirts of the city, where more than than 30 drug manufacturing companies supplying nearly all the world’s major drug companies are based. Thousands of tons of pharmaceutical waste are produced by the factories each day, the paper says.
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