There’s an obvious lesson to learn concerning the consequences of the single-minded pursuit of profit in this appalling article from NewScientist (25 May 2019, paywall):
THE Medak district, to the north-west of Hyderabad in southern India, was once a pristine landscape. People came to bathe in the cool, refreshing lakes and streams. These days the air is foul. With every breath, chemicals irritate your lungs and, after a while, you feel nauseous. The colour of the water doesn’t help: it ranges from bright orange to deep brown, and is often covered in a thick layer of white foam.
The reason for this blight is not well hidden. Behind high walls and barbed wire fences, factories churn out cheap drugs for the global market. Tall chimneys belch black smoke and tankers trundle along dirt tracks under cover of darkness to dump toxic chemical waste. “It’s like a slow poison,” says Batte Shankar, the head of one village we visited. “When you Europeans are taking these antibiotics to heal, it is good for you. But we are suffering.” …
The foetid lakes and streams contain extraordinarily high concentrations of antibiotics, creating reservoirs of the drug-resistant pathogens that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Some suspect these places might even be incubating new superbugs that could rapidly spread around the world.
It’s a little horrifying that our pursuit of good health is pushing another country’s environment and health to the brink. You’d think the local authorities would be cognizant of the problem, wouldn’t you?
But Hyderabad’s hinterlands aren’t going to stop churning out antibiotics any time soon. In March 2018, local officials announced the construction of Pharma City, a new pharmaceutical park at Mucherla, south of the city, that will host between 900 and 1000 companies. Indeed, local authorities promote this latest venture with the slogan, “minimum inspection, maximum facilitation”.
Greed? Or desperation? Finding ways to transfer wealth from the wealthy West to the needy East is a great motivation, especially as India emerges from its former socialist form. While capitalism has a lot going for it, I think here we’re seeing a terrible excess which, if things go seriously wrong, a substantial part of human civilization, West or East, could end up paying for.
