Alarming antibiotics

The alarm about antibiotic resistance has been raised a notch after a global study on the presence of antibiotics in the world’s rivers. While the presence of pollutants, plastics and trash in freshwater supplies has been highlighted before, there has been little work to highlight the risks of the presence of antibiotics in our water supplies. The numbers are scary: two-thirds of test sites in 72 countries show the presence of antibiotics. In over 20 percent of these, the numbers are higher than what is considered dangerous. The study itself was able to confirm the presence of dangerously high levels of antibiotics in hundreds of sites across the world, ranging from River Thames to the Tigris river. The situation poses a major challenge for the global fight against antibiotics resistance. Antibiotic pollution is considered a crucial way through which bacteria are able to develop resistance to life-saving medicines. Doctors believe that much of the antibiotic resistance is coming from bacteria present in the environment.

Only last month, the UN had warned that antibiotic-resistance bacteria could kill around 10 million people by 2050. This constitutes a global health emergency, which requires significant preventive measures on the part of governments and the public – before its too late. Antibiotics make it into the rivers through multiple sources, including human and animal waste and leaks from wastewater treatment plants and drug manufacturing facilities. What is even more worrying is that the contamination includes antibiotics considered critical to the treatment of serious infections.

While the presence of generic antibiotics itself would be a cause of worry, there should be serious questions about how last-stage antibiotics are making it into rivers. In Europe, some of the rivers have up to four times higher antibiotic levels than considered dangerous. In Bangladesh, the level of antibiotics exceeded the safe limit by more than 300 times, which were ironically found close to a waste water treatment facility. Not only does the presence of antibiotics threaten our future, it poses an immediate threat to wildlife in rivers. In some rivers, fish are unable to survive because of toxic levels of antibiotics. Stopping the dumping of waste and sewage directly into rivers is one place to start – but it appears there is little appetite to solve one of the biggest challenges to the future of humanity.