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Drug Company CEO Blames Drug Industry For Increased Drug Resistance
BarbaraHudson writes Times Live is reporting that while doctors have usually been blamed for bacterial resistance because of over-prescribing, Karl Rotthier, chief executive of the Dutch DSM Sinochem Pharmaceuticals, claims lax procedures at drugs companies are the real cause. "Most antibiotics are now produced in China and India and I do not think it is unjust to say that the environmental conditions have been quite different in these regions. Poor controls mean that antibiotics are leaking out and getting into drinking water. They are in the fish and cattle that we eat, and global travel and exports mean bacteria are traveling. That is making a greater contribution to the growth of antibiotic resistance than over-prescribing", Rothier said. "We cannot have companies discharging untreated waste water into our environment, contributing to illness and, worse, antibacterial resistance. We cannot accept that rivers in India show higher concentrations of active antibiotic than the blood of someone undergoing treatment."
"We cannot have companies discharging untreated waste water into our environment, contributing to illness and, worse, antibacterial resistance. We cannot accept that rivers in India show higher concentrations of active antibiotic than the blood of someone undergoing treatment."
I'm just happy that Monsanto is not one of these drug companies. They'd probably sue everyone on the planet for drinking water that may contain their product and not paying for the privilege of consuming their pollutants.
Graphics in linked articles show the effluent of Indian wastewater treatment plants. Few public wastewater facilities can, or were designed to, remove antibiotics from our waste. They are designed for household waste, not industrial waste. Most antibiotics and other drugs pass straight through a typical wastewater plant unharmed. In the USA, Industrial PreTreatment is required for businesses that would otherwise discharge toxic or damaging substances to a public treatment plant. Usually the offending business builds, runs, and pays for pretreatment. Unless, of course, the "good ol' boy" system can unload the cost onto local residents.
America and India have the same problem; India just has more metric tons of it and far less regulation.
FYI: licensed wastewater operator (retired).
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
So is he saying that doctors should keep prescribing antibiotics for illness where they are unnecessary, and that prophylactic application of antibiotics in agriculture should continue? That is, the only thing that needs to be fixed is the manufacturing leakage?
Of course that's the only problem. Because, in India and China, those problems aren't likely to be fixed any time soon (perhaps if ever). If over-prescription isn't the problem, doctors and agricultural users can continue purchasing unnecessarily large quantities of the drugs, guilt free. That's a convenient stance for a drug company CEO to have.
I'm not saying that mishandled wastage at a drug plant isn't an issue. It appears that it is. The CEO said so. But I'd me more interested in seeing facts that back up his claim that overuse is not the issue causing antibacterial resistant bacteria. The overuse is probably more widespread than the factories, and probably more likely to be the cause of the superbugs in your area (unless, of course, your area is near these factories).
Demanding? I couldn't get the doctor to stop prescribing antibiotics for my kid for every minor throat infection. I just wanted to know whether it was serious or not (usually because we were going on vacation or visiting other families with very young babies and some anti-vaxxers.)
I think I threw away four or five prescriptions immediately when we got home. Didn't even check what they were for, the remark 'Take this and come back in two weeks if it persists. Oh, you must use the prescription in its entirety' was enough to know that it wasn't serious and they were prescribing antibiotics anyway.
Eventually we just started going to another doctor, but we haven't had a suspicious cough yet since we changed.
Besides, how many people just throw old pills in the *garbage* ? I'm pretty sure that's the main reason for drug resistance.
It's funny, because this illustrates the bigger problem of people not being aware that when they stop taking antibiotics early, they potentially breed resistant bacteria if their illness relapses. *Noone* should have any antibiotics left to throw the garbage, with the rare exception of someone having an allergic reaction to them.
My one coworker ceased her antibiotics when she felt better, relapsed, and had to get stronger antibiotics. In the meantime, she infected two of her family members with the more resilient bacteria, one of whom had to be hospitalized.
So it's the water coming out of the plant that (sometimes) reaches that level. The actual river has orders of magnitude more flow than that.
So he may have a valid point, but this is obvious FUD.
So in other words, the river itself might have a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of a concentration below the therapeutic MIC (potentially of multiple different antibiotics, depending on what factories happen to be located on that river).
Your interpretation of this is doesn't-matter, therefore FUD. My interpretation of this is enough to exert influence on relative competitiveness within a microbial community, and exert selection for antibiotic resistance.
Long before you reach lethal anti-microbial concentrations, you get subtle changes in growth rate and microbial gene expression. In agriculture, farms routinely use antibiotics at just a few percent of therapeutic dosing, and that is already enough to cause massive changes in the microbial community (with the side-effect of improving the growth rate of the host animal). You don't need to directly kill the microbes themselves, you just need enough to skew the balance of power between the various micro-organisms that are busy competing with each other.
The concentrations in the river may be a fraction below even that, but even slight pressures are enough to alter the course of evolution, when administered over a long enough time period. And "long enough" in this situation is in the context of an organism with 20-minute generation times.