When a team of researchers from Sweden first started measuring chemicals in a river near Patancheru, India, they found shocking concentrations of drugs flowing downstream-for example, levels of the potent antibiotic ciprofloxacin greater than those found in the blood of humans taking the drug. A major source of these drugs was treated wastewater from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants that was discharged into the river and surrounding environs, as Joakim Larsson and his colleagues from the University of Gothenburg reported several years ago. An update published in PLoS ONE now links the drugs with downstream development of microbes with genetic resistance to multiple antibiotics typically used to treat human illness.
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