Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

The downstream effects of antibiotic waste

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There’s a flood of data suggesting that dumping drugs in our water systems might pose a serious problem. Researchers in Cuba have spotted a high frequency of antibiotic resistance genes in the water near pharmaceutical firms on the Almendares River near Havana, Cuba. Another finding in this wave of studies comes from Northern China, where scientists uncovered greater drug resistance among microbes in wastewater downstream from a local drug manufacturer than in microbes upstream.

Another drop in the bucket came yesterday from a team led by microbiologist Joakim Larsson of the University of Göteborg in Sweden.

Four years ago, Larsson discovered large quantities of antibiotics, including Cipro (Ciprofloxacin), in the wastewater streams near a hub of generic drug manufacturers in southern India.

Now, his team has found that these increased levels of antibiotics likely spur the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In a study published yesterday in PLoS One, the researchers found that the wastewater treated by the same southern India plant contained bacteria with 37 antibiotic resistance genes. By comparison, they came across only one antibiotic resistance gene in populations growing in wastewater treated by a lakefront town in Sweden.

The team is now looking to see if these resistant bacteria are finding their way into the drinking water of neighboring communities in Southwestern India.

“It would be quite possible to radically reduce the release of antibiotics from manufacturing,” says Larsson. “There needs to be economical incentives to stop huge releases of antibiotics in the environment because it’s not regulated anywhere in the world.”

Image: Accretion Disc, Flickr

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