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First global look finds most rivers awash with antibiotics -- National Geographic

  
Via:  Nerm_L  •  5 years ago  •  1 comments


First global look finds most rivers awash with antibiotics -- National Geographic
Almost two-thirds of the rivers studied contained enough antibiotics to contribute to the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

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EACH YEAR, HUMANS produce, prescribe, and ingest more antibiotics than they did the year before. Those drugs have done wonders for public health, saving millions from infections that might otherwise have killed them.



But the drugs' influence persists in the environment long after they've done their duty in human bodies. They leach into the outside world, where their presence can spur the development of “antibiotic resistant” strains of bacteria. In a new study that surveyed 91 rivers around the world, researchers found antibiotics in the waters of nearly two-thirds of all the sites they sampled, from the Thames to the Mekong to the Tigris.



That's a big deal, says Alistair Boxoll, the study's co-lead scientist and an environmental chemist at the University of York, in the U.K. “These are biologically active molecules, and we as a society are excreting tons of them into the environment,” he says.



That leads to the potential for huge effects on the ecology of the rivers—as well as on human health.

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A 2016 report found that each year around 700,000 people worldwide die of infections that are resistant to the antibiotics we have today. Scientists, medical experts, and public health officials worry that number could skyrocket as resistance to commonly used medicines increases. In 2014, a U.K.-commissioned study warned that by 2050, antimicrobial-resistant infections could be the leading cause of death worldwide.

And antibiotic “pollution,” in which excess antibiotics enter natural systems and influence the bacteria living there, helps speed along the development of resistant strains. It also disrupts the delicate ecological balances in rivers and streams, changing the makeup of bacterial communities.

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“The problem really is global,” says Boxall.



That’s not particularly surprising, says Rosi, because “anywhere people use pharmaceuticals in their everyday lives, we see the evidence downstream.”



Bodies don’t break down the drugs, so the excess comes out in urine or waste. In many developed countries, the waste—and its load of antibiotics—passes through a wastewater treatment plant, but even the state-of-the-art plants don’t clear away all of the drugs. In places with no treatment plants, the antibiotics can flow even more directly into rivers and streams.



The data matched up with those expectations. The concentrations of many of the antibiotics were highest downstream of treatment plants and river-adjacent trash dumps, and in places where sewage was routed directly into river waters.

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Gaze stresses that there is much more research to be done before scientists understand exactly how the evolution of antibiotic resistance works. But, he says, now is the time for communities to find solutions that will keep antibiotics from flooding into rivers, because the potential outcomes for human health are so serious.



"There's a tendency to say we should use a precautionary approach," he says. "But by the time we have all the scientific evidence, it may be too late. We may have gotten ourselves to a post-antibiotic era when people are dying after being scratched by a rose in their garden and ending up with an untreatable infection.”

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Excerpts from the article published by National Geographic.  Click on the seed link to read the full analysis.





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Nerm_L
Professor Expert
1  seeder  Nerm_L    5 years ago

Is the problem caused by business, science, or politics?  When solving one problem creates a bigger problem who is responsible?

 
 

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