Drug waste creates highest disaster zone in Andhra

27 Jan 2009, AP

PATANCHERU: When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were Drug waste creates highest disaster zone in Andhra Pradesh shocked. Powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

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.

These factories, located on NH-9, just 28km from Hyderabad, produce drugs for much of the world. The result: Some of Andhra'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 exper t 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 home, a few miles downstream from the Patancheru treatment plant. High drug concentrations were recently found in her well water.

"When the local leaders come, we offer them water and they won't take it."

Patancheru became a hub for largely unregulated chemical and drug factories in the 1980s, creating what is described locally as an "ecological sacrifice zone" with its pharmaceutical 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 concentrations of pharmaceuticals had been found in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans. But the wastewater downstream from the Indian plants contained 150 times the highest levels 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.