AlterNet: Who's Really Paying High Prices for Your Pharmaceuticals

[marmar]

Who's Really Paying High Prices for Your Pharmaceuticals

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted August 27, 2007.


Many of us rely on drugs imported from developing countries like India. But a new report reveals the toxic industry that produces them and the people who pay the price.


Hazardous imports have been the top story on the evening news for weeks now. But the poor quality of some foreign-made products is only half the story. Before we ever see those products, manufacturing plants in the countries of origin can pose an even greater danger to human and ecological health.

Take India, which is now our biggest foreign source of pharmaceuticals. A just-published study by Sweden's Goteborg University shows that, whatever the quality of the drugs being shipped out of India, they are leaving behind a toxic mess. Even after days in a water-treatment plant, effluents discharged into streams and rivers in one Indian region show concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs at 100 to 30,000 times the levels considered safe.

In a 2005 story, I described the devastation of water, land and human health that I saw in the area around Patancheru, India -- damage that local villagers, doctors and environmentalists attribute to pollution from the 90 or more bulk-drug factories in the vicinity. State law says that the factories must haul their toxic wastes to an effluent treatment plant run by Patancheru Enviro Tech, Ltd. (PETL) on a tributary of the Nakkavagu rivulet. The treatment plant's outflow into the Nakkavagu (which waters a valley dotted with 14 villages) has often been found to carry industrial pollutants at many times the statutory limits.

Now the Swedish study, recently published online by the Journal of Hazardous Materials (abstract here free) has found record-breaking concentrations of 11 drugs -- antibiotics and treatments for high blood pressure, ulcers and allergies -- in wastes flowing from the PETL plant.

Noting that "to the best of our knowledge, the concentrations of these 11 drugs were all above the previously highest values reported in any sewage effluent," the authors singled out the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin (Cipro), which flows out of the plant at the rate of 100 pounds of active ingredient per day. That, say the authors, "is equivalent to the total amount consumed in Sweden (population 9 million) over an average five-day period"! .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/59986/

[fed-up]

1. the US consumes more than necessary and leaves toxic hell holes behind-

When will we ever start taking responsibility for what we are doing to this planet?

when will we start teaching our children about the consequences of our actions?

when will we learn that there are many other options for treatment that don't include poisoning ourselves/others?

when will we learn that if we take better care of ourselves and don't eat the garbage that is grown with toxins and packaged with toxins that we will not need to medicate ourselves with even more toxins?


our over consumption of medications is just as bad as our invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq with hazardous chemicals


time for us to wake up and look at the disaster and death we are leaving in our path

end of rant