The environment is becoming a key factor in the formation of resistance to antibiotics. This is noted with concern in the new report of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). All over the world, antibiotics are used to treat and prevent bacterial infections that affect humans, animals and even plants. Simultaneously, they are used as growth stimulators in animal husbandry. As a consequence, they come in huge amounts in the nature with wastewater from pharmaceutical companies, with agricultural and industrial wastes. On landfills there are mountains of overdue or unused medicines.
A group of international experts explored the Isakawagu river basin. They were alarmed by the situation at the water treatment plant in Patancheru near Hyderabad (India). Here, wastewater is treated, daily formed at 90 pharmaceutical companies, which are then discharged into Isakavag. As a result of the analysis of discharged water, it was found that ciprofloxacin, one of the most common antibiotics, was contained in them at a concentration sufficient for daily treatment of 44,000 people!
The figure enters a state of shock. This is not an isolated incident, the UN News Center reported. This means that antibiotics in significant concentrations can be found in many reservoirs, sedimentary rocks and soils of the planet. Medicines, once protecting human health, gradually undermine it. The environment increasingly becomes a reservoir of antimicrobial substances and resistant pathogens.
