India bearing brunt of Swedish pharmaceutical wastes

Gothenburg, February 9: A latest research by scientists from the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, highlights how medicines sold in Sweden pose a grave threat to environment in India.

The research shows that Sweden is the main consumer of the pharmaceutical products manufactured in factories that do not treat their waste sufficiently.

The study findings, published in the medical journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, were recently in the headlines in a number of newspapers that include New York Times, Washington Post and Times of India.

It was found that the substances used in manufacturing most of the common medicines sold in Sweden are produced in the factories in India. Few of those factories emit huge amounts of antibiotics and other similar substances into the environment, which creates resistant bacteria.

Joakim Larsson, Associate Professor of the Sahlgrenska Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden, and also one of the research scientists engaged in the study, remarked, “We used to think that pharmaceuticals that ended up in the environment mostly came from the use of the medicines and that the substances were dispersed through wastewater. We now know that certain factories that manufacture substances release very large quantities of active substances.”

Professor Larsson’s research team visited the industrial zone in proximity with Hyderabad, India, a major area for the production of pharmaceutical substances. They took samples of the water discharged from a treatment plant, which is responsible for treating wastewater gathered from about 90 pharmaceutical factories before it is actually released.

Larsson said, “We have previously shown that the “treated” water contained exceptionally high levels of various pharmaceutical substances, including several broad-spectrum antibiotics. We estimated that the treatment plant released 45 kilograms of the antibioticdefine ciprofloxacin in one day, which is equivalent to five times the daily consumption of Sweden.”

Such huge levels of antibiotics in water are a cause of concern as they might result in increased chances of generating resistant bacteria. The end result will be that antibiotics which are effective today might be rendered ineffective soon.

For their analysis, researchers took data from the Swedish Medical Products Agency for all 242 products sold in the Swedish markets that had any one of the nine specific substances. They found that substances from India were present in 123 products and 31 percent products had active substance from a factory that sends its wastewater to the treatment plant outside Hyderabad, which they investigated.

Larsson was quoted as saying, “The analysis shows quite clearly that a large number of medicinal products on the Swedish market is made by manufacturers that send their effluent to a treatment plant that does not treat their water satisfactorily.”