A reader remarks on my post concerning pharma pollution in Hyderabad, India:
There’s a lot of missing information here. Are they really just making antibiotics there? Other drugs for chronic diseases are more often under patent and/or highly profitable. Does this really have anything to do with our pursuit of health, as the article suggests? Or is that just a red herring, and it’s more about Big Pharma finding yet another way to increase their already obscene profits? In fact, my unresearched opinion is that “cheap meds” from overseas have nothing do with this despicable practice, and more with the captive government we have in this country driving prices and profits up.
… We know that the majority of antibiotics are actually used by industrial agriculture, not humans, for instance. Perhaps these factories in India are producing agricultural antibiotics? “Some 7 million pounds of antibiotics are sold for human use each year, while 29 million pounds are sold for use in animals, mostly food animals.” [2012].
In the limited I have available I’ve been unable to find any studies identifying the types of drugs manufactured in Hyderabad. I did run across this article from 2016 in Ecologist, indicating NHS (presumably Britain’s National Health System) buys drugs, presumably human, from India:
Yet the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that firms with a history of bad practice and pollution are supplying the NHS, and environmental standards do not feature in NHS procurement protocols.
New tests on water samples taken outside pharmaceutical factories in India which sell to the NHS found they contained bacteria which were resistant to the antibiotics made inside the plants.
This suggests industrial waste containing active antibiotic ingredients is being leaked into the surrounding environment. Studies have shown how this causes nearby bacteria to develop immunity to the drugs – creating ‘superbugs’ – and that those resistant bacteria then spread around the world.
Responding to the Bureau’s findings, the Department of Health (DoH) said it would consider bringing in new rules for antibiotic factories which export drugs to Britain.
So at least some India-manufactured drugs are used in humans.
I’m not quite sure about the ‘pursuit of health’ angle, but it’s well known that GPs are often chivvied by virus-stricken patients into dispensing useless antibiotics; in fact, I remember going in to the urgent care and getting grumped at by a doctor on the subject, and I had to promise to wait some period of time before filling the prescription, on the assumption that if it was a viral infection, it’d be gone within that period of time.
The point being is that we’re ravenous for good health, even if we insist on not exercising and eating any old bad thing, and so, yes, our appetite for health, not to mention cheap food, drives the problems in Hyderabad.
I regret not finding any studies on just what is manufactured. This is a lot of hand-waving.
