According to the recent reports of the study conducted by AIIMS, traces of antibiotics have been found in water samples collected from Yamuna river. The experts said the water can impact the aquatic ecosystem and may lead to drug resistance in microbes. Dr Vel Pandian, professor in the pharmacology department of the premier institute has shared his views regarding the study and its effects in the water.

He said, Analysis was done for water samples collected from six different places on Yamuna river between Wazirabad and Kalindi Kunj under three classes of antibiotics Fluoroquinolone, used to treat respiratory and urinary tract infections, and Macrolides and Penicillin, a group of antibiotics used for a large range of bacterial infections like pneumonia, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever etc.

These antibiotics get into the river water through human excreta, urine and via drains. People often throw away unused medicines in the garbage that, eventually, end up in the river via drains. To our astonishment, all the water samples were found to have all kinds of antibiotics which may eventually lead to a terrible situation where infections that are responding to current antibiotic therapy may stop working in the future as the microbes will develop drug resistance.

“These drug-resistant microbes could enter human bodies in different ways. For instance, if someone uses this water for washing the vegetables or growing them, the microbes may enter the body and cause several diseases which will not respond to the currently available drugs,” said Dr Pandian. He added that a person consumes 2gm to 34gm of bioactive compounds in a month.

These bioactive compounds, which could be antibiotic, drug or preservatives used in the food, total up to about 450 tonnes for a population of 1.7 crores in a year in Delhi alone. Bioactive compounds that are disposed of in water and their degraded products would be of interest while analyzing the origin of diseases like diabetes and cancer.