Researchers have discovered that the huge pharmaceutical industry in India has led to severely contaminated wastewater downstream from drug factories. How severe? The water contains 150 times the highest levels of contamination found in the United States. According to the AP, that’s enough antibiotics being dumped into the water everyday to treat every person in a city of 90,000 people. And we thought we had it bad last year when traced amounts of pharmaceuticals in U.S. drinking water were found to have affected 46 million people!

Most researchers agree that this is the highest level of pharmaceuticals ever found in drinking water. Twenty-one different pharmaceuticals could be in that water at any given moment. Much of India’s poor are left to drink and use that water as it flows downstream, and results of scientific testing show that some of those chemicals, even in trace amounts, can cause serious damage in both humans and species in the wild. When mixed with sewage in water, bacteria can be even more potent.

But it’s not just downstream that researchers found the pharmaceuticals. Lakes upstream tested positive, meaning illegal dumping could be occurring.

Read more about pharmaceuticals at Green Options
India’s waste treatment processes aren’t as strictly regulated as they are in the United States and Europe. Even after this find, though, it may still take awhile for stricter regulation and clean-up to occur, as pollution control officials haven’t yet trusted this new research, as it was done by a foreign team. People like the head of India’s Bulk Drug Manufacturer’s Association insist that contamination comes from human excrement and other industry waste.

But while there’s still debate, there’s no question that the dirty waters will affect India’s poor above all, who lack the political and social connections to regulate the industry. They remain the people who will still drink the water daily and hope that the combinations of pharmaceuticals in the water don’t irreparably affect their bodies.

(Por Amanda Peterka, Red Greend Blue, 26/01/2009)