It’s no longer just the side effects of their medicines.
A new study found “excessively high” levels of antibiotic and antifungal drugs in water sources near a major drug production center in India where 50% of the country’s drug exports are produced and a fifth of the world’s generic drugs. Unsurprisingly, the researchers also found high levels of microbes that were resistant to those drugs.
It should give us no comfort that this was found in India and not the US. Microbes travel long distances with ease. A drug-resistant pathogen first noticed in parts of China infected its first US patient last year.
Of the twenty-three water samples the researchers took, all but one contained bacteria that were resistant to multiple drugs; all samples contained carbapenemase-producing bacteria, which are known as the “nightmare bacteria” because it is virtually untreatable and kills up to 50% of those who get infected.
Some drugs were found in concentrations hundreds or thousands times higher than recommended safe limits. One water sample contained an antifungal drug in concentrations 950,000 times higher than the safe limit.
Sadly once again, Big Pharma is getting a little help from the FDA. In order to export drugs to the US, foreign drug manufacturers must adhere to good manufacturing processes and are supposed to be inspected periodically by the FDA. Given that the FDA is way behind on its inspections, the manufacturing practices foreign companies must follow do not include anything about contaminating the environment.
And as we have reported before, here in the US people dump drugs into the toilet to dispose of them or they become part of human waste. Municipal treatment plants don’t even test for the presence of these drugs, so treated water or sludge put on farmland may be loaded with them.
As we’ve reported before, antibiotic resistance is a growing catastrophe and expected to kill ten million people a year worldwide by 2050. Even now, these superbugs kill around 700,000 people a year. This public health crisis is fueled by over prescription of antibiotics and overuse of these medicines on CAFOs (concentrated feeding animal lots). Now we can add Big Pharma’s pollution of our waterways to the list. Even if we refuse to take pharmaceutical drugs and rely on natural alternatives to antibiotics, we can still be sickened or even killed by them.
Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:
Lying Labels, No Response
Orwellian Medicine on the Horizon
FDA Committee Sides With Big Pharma…Again
12 comments
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It’s so concentrated discouraging to see how lacking in basic medicine the writer of my relied-on source of medical-political news is. Sepsis and Septic Shock also have a 30-50% death rate in hospitals, with all the blessed anti-biotics in existence to lavish on the victim. So why should we fear these unknowable anti-biotic resistant bacteria when that already is curable IF THE HOSPITALS WOULD USE AN INTRAVENOUS COCKTAIL OF VITAMIN C, HYDROCORTISON etc… As was demonstrated in the latest issue of the Orthomolecular Medical News Magazine just this past week. 50% mortality reduced to 1%, inexpensively and totally safe beyond any reason to deny it to patients. There hasn’t been a virus or bacterial infectious disease yet that would not be treatable with reasonable expectations.
So stop threatening me with your fears out of ignorance. Get the machinery moving to make such cocktails the rule….. I’ve sent copies of the press release to those I know in surgery and ER… also to political legislators writing guidelines for medical operations. If people feel more empowered maybe the legislators will get some spine….. ttyl
Yep, vitamin C works on every disease in mega doses!
if a company could patent vitamin c and sell it for big bucks it would be the next miracle drug and the FDA would be singing it’s praises
I don’t think so. The FDA wants to get rid of people like us. We know too much and cure is not what they are after. Pharma and our govt consider people like us a threat to their eugenics slave system.
And the scary part is that we in the USA have to depend on China or sometimes Scotland to produce the C, b/c there are no manufacturers of C in the USA… why, why, why! Surely that’s a real national security risk IMO.. how about yours….. likely no thought to stockpiles, rotfl… yikes..
Exactly! Apparently cure is not on the menu.
The FDA has banned the use of IV vitamin C due to it’s not being a “drug.” It is apparently too effective and a threat to the profit margins of Big Pharma. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are plentiful right here in the US- I have personally experienced such an infection, and I am immunodefficient. Drug residues in the water and environment are also significantly impacting wildlife, decreasing their fertility, causing abnormal growth, derailing their endocrine systems, etc. They are our canary in a coalmine. If you think this will not impact us directly, you are misinformed; it already is. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are far from “unknowable,” and your point about sepsis merely supports ANH’s argument, not counters it. I have a medical degree and worked in biomedical research for years; this writer raises a valid and urgently important issue that affects us all, whether we know it or not. As an advocate of orthomolecular medicine, I would think you would be supportive here.
The Brits found out how important VIT. C was on there sea voyages.Now we the people have been sold out by big PHARMA —–vote them all out…—…
Unfortunately the FDA etc. are not elected officials. We must put pressure on the ones that are (Congress, the President) to take action here.
You’d have to out bid Big Corporate.
vit c does even more than that but wait, that’s just wooo
I think the old ways are working too, but then I’m nostalgic