India’s drug industry is one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotics, worth well over $17 billion. And despite the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cracking down on violations during inspections of manufacturing facilities this year, the industry continues to grow.
But last month, activists, researchers and industry officials told Reuters that lax local environmental regulations have allowed many of the drug manufacturers in the country to pollute rivers and lakes with antibiotics, helping to spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In September, Reuters reported on Kazhipally lake in Medak, a lake so polluted and frothy with antibiotic residues that no one dares to go near its shores.
The lake is just a short drive from India’s tech hub of Hyderabad. This pharmaceutical hub has over 300 drug companies, churning out cheap generic antibiotics for markets around the world, including the united States.
In the process of mass-producing all these drugs, Reuters says that lax oversight, little regard for environmental regulations and inadequate water treatment has resulted in rivers and lakes becoming loaded with antibiotic residues, “making this a giant Petri dish for antimicrobial resistance.”
The drug lobby speaks out
On Thursday, speaking at a news conference in Hyderabad, P.V. Appaji, the director of the Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council (Pharmexil), spoke out against the way the news media has been targeting the country’s pharmaceutical industry.
Appaji said India’s drug factory environmental standards were “regularly audited by foreign customers,” including drug distributors — but he added that he did not know first-hand how often the alleged audits took place.
In a statement, Pharmexcil agreed there was a serious threat to the public’s health from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, citing lax environmental control as being one of the reasons for the increase in the number of “superbugs.” The statement also mentioned that the Indian government had recently announced some “measures to curb the excessive/irrational use of antibiotics.”
Cheap antibiotics at the expense of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
The bottom line in these latest media claims is that the poor environmental regulations and the lack of enforcement by governmental agencies is nothing new in India. Studies that go back over a decade have shown the problem of antibiotic residue pollution has been well documented.
The latest study of Kazhipally lake conducted by Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, done in 2015 said, “The polluted lakes harbored considerably higher proportions of ciprofloxacin-resistant and sulfamethoxazole-resistant bacteria than did other Indian and Swedish lakes included for comparison.”
In response, the Hyderabad-based Bulk Drug Manufacturers Association of India (BDMAI) said the state Pollution Control Board (PCB) had also done a study on the lake and found “no antibiotics.” The PCB was unwilling or possibly unable to provide a copy of the report.
Water treatment plants in Hyderabad and other regions in India are not up to standards to handle industrial waste, let alone human sewage, which is full of bacteria. The more that bacteria is exposed to antibiotics, the easier it becomes for bacteria to mutate into “superbugs.”
We are already aware of the overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and in farming. Now, we can add pollution from antibiotic manufacturers as being a third factor in causing antibiotic resistance.
