RisingShiningSuperpower
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Modi-ji and his capable ministers are hard at work on a plan to clean up the Ganges. I'm confident that they will succeed splendidly!
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15af211a-b2c6-11e4-a058-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RfkCkk7s
Toxic Ganges adds to spread of drug-resistant bacteria
Antibiotic resistance, a factor in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide each year, is spreading in south Asia via the Ganges riverand other water sources and becoming an increasingly grave international threat, according to scientists and doctors.
Levels of a highly resistant bacterial gene known as NDM-1, which makes several life-threatening infections immune to drug treatments, surge in the relatively clean waters of the upper Ganges when Hindu pilgrims from India’s cities travel there en masse to worship at sites such as Rishikesh and Haridwar, according to one study.
Such research confirms that antibiotic resistance genes, which in developed countries are a particular risk for hospital patients exposed to other sick people, can be spread easily through water in places with poor sanitation.
“The only route it can enter the water is through faecal contamination,” said TR Sreekrishnan, a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Technology and an author of the report. “If you do not properly treat the waste before it is discharged into the rivers you are not only contaminating the water, you are also assisting the proliferation of antibiotic resistance.”
NDM-1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, was discovered seven years ago in India in a patient infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae. It has since been found in New Delhi’s drinking water, and spread around the world, including to the US and UK.
Health experts believe that the rise in drug-resistant bacteria in India is caused not only by poor sanitation but also the widespread over-prescription of antibiotics.
The two factors combined “make India a perfect system for the spread of antibiotic resistance”, said David Livermore, professor of medical microbiology at the UK’s University of East Anglia. “India and Pakistan are the first countries where this kind of resistance has got real traction,” he added. A possibly more dangerous variant, known as NDM-4, has also been detected in sewage in a hospital in Aligarh, north India.
Tim Walsh, a microbiology professor at Cardiff university who first drew attention to NDM-1 in 2010, said India’s political and medical establishment were in denial about the scale of the problem. One reason, he suggested, was that hospitals do not want to deter the hundreds of thousands of “medical tourists” who visit India each year.
Prof Walsh, who said he is no longer welcomed in India, has studied patients at a public hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, where a quarter had picked up NDM-1 before admission.
More than 58,000 infants in India die each year from infections made resistant to antibiotics by genes such as NDM-1, and a further 200,000 lives are lost annually in the US, China and Europe alone. “This problem is about to get a lot worse,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, vice-president for research and policy at the Public Health Foundation of India. “It would be hard to culture [bacteria from] river water in India and not find antibiotic resistance genes.”
Jim O’Neill, the economist leading an official UK review of antimicrobial resistance, will visit India next month. He has warned that drug-resistant infections will cause 10m deaths a year by 2050 — as many as cancer — unless the world takes preventive action.
David Graham, an environmental engineering professor at Newcastle University who has also studied NDM-1 in India, warned that the crisis would worsen unless the issue of water pollution was addressed. In an article he co-authored in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Prof Graham concluded: “Unless such a perspective is adopted, we will almost certainly enter a ‘post-antibiotic age’ that many doomsayers are predicting”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15af211a-b2c6-11e4-a058-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RfkCkk7s
Toxic Ganges adds to spread of drug-resistant bacteria
Antibiotic resistance, a factor in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide each year, is spreading in south Asia via the Ganges riverand other water sources and becoming an increasingly grave international threat, according to scientists and doctors.
Levels of a highly resistant bacterial gene known as NDM-1, which makes several life-threatening infections immune to drug treatments, surge in the relatively clean waters of the upper Ganges when Hindu pilgrims from India’s cities travel there en masse to worship at sites such as Rishikesh and Haridwar, according to one study.
Such research confirms that antibiotic resistance genes, which in developed countries are a particular risk for hospital patients exposed to other sick people, can be spread easily through water in places with poor sanitation.
“The only route it can enter the water is through faecal contamination,” said TR Sreekrishnan, a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Technology and an author of the report. “If you do not properly treat the waste before it is discharged into the rivers you are not only contaminating the water, you are also assisting the proliferation of antibiotic resistance.”
NDM-1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, was discovered seven years ago in India in a patient infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae. It has since been found in New Delhi’s drinking water, and spread around the world, including to the US and UK.
Health experts believe that the rise in drug-resistant bacteria in India is caused not only by poor sanitation but also the widespread over-prescription of antibiotics.
The two factors combined “make India a perfect system for the spread of antibiotic resistance”, said David Livermore, professor of medical microbiology at the UK’s University of East Anglia. “India and Pakistan are the first countries where this kind of resistance has got real traction,” he added. A possibly more dangerous variant, known as NDM-4, has also been detected in sewage in a hospital in Aligarh, north India.
Tim Walsh, a microbiology professor at Cardiff university who first drew attention to NDM-1 in 2010, said India’s political and medical establishment were in denial about the scale of the problem. One reason, he suggested, was that hospitals do not want to deter the hundreds of thousands of “medical tourists” who visit India each year.
Prof Walsh, who said he is no longer welcomed in India, has studied patients at a public hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, where a quarter had picked up NDM-1 before admission.
More than 58,000 infants in India die each year from infections made resistant to antibiotics by genes such as NDM-1, and a further 200,000 lives are lost annually in the US, China and Europe alone. “This problem is about to get a lot worse,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, vice-president for research and policy at the Public Health Foundation of India. “It would be hard to culture [bacteria from] river water in India and not find antibiotic resistance genes.”
Jim O’Neill, the economist leading an official UK review of antimicrobial resistance, will visit India next month. He has warned that drug-resistant infections will cause 10m deaths a year by 2050 — as many as cancer — unless the world takes preventive action.
David Graham, an environmental engineering professor at Newcastle University who has also studied NDM-1 in India, warned that the crisis would worsen unless the issue of water pollution was addressed. In an article he co-authored in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Prof Graham concluded: “Unless such a perspective is adopted, we will almost certainly enter a ‘post-antibiotic age’ that many doomsayers are predicting”.
