Drinking Water Tainted in India
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-06/delhi-belly-isn-t-only-india-water-risk-as-resistan...
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Drinking India’s tap water can yield more than a bad case of Delhi belly.
Scientists testing water samples from New Delhi found more than a dozen species of bacteria, ranging from strains that cause pneumonia to cholera. The bugs had genes that enable them to resist almost all medicines, according to a study published today in the medical journal The Lancet.
The research exposes the role played by India, a booming economy with more mobile-phone subscribers than toilets, in fanning the development of drug-evading bacteria. As 30 million people fly out of the country annually, some are leaving with bowel-dwelling bugs that may cause deadly sepsis and defeat the most powerful antibiotic treatments.
“There is not even a light you can see at the end of this dark tunnel,” said Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases doctor who teaches at the Australian National University in Canberra. “People are dying from infections that are no longer treatable with available antibiotics.”
The researchers, led by Timothy Walsh of Cardiff University in Wales, collected 171 swabs from some of the drains that line New Delhi’s streets and 50 samples of public tap water in September and October. The samples were tested in the U.K. to identify the bacteria they contained and whether the germs had a gene known as NDM-1, which makes them resistant to a class of antibiotics-of-last resort known as carbapenems.
The gene was found in two of the drinking-water and 51 of the seepage samples, including in Vibrio cholerae, Shigella boydii and nine other bacteria species not previously reported to harbor the resistance mechanism.
Scientists testing water samples from New Delhi found more than a dozen species of bacteria, ranging from strains that cause pneumonia to cholera. The bugs had genes that enable them to resist almost all medicines, according to a study published today in the medical journal The Lancet.
The research exposes the role played by India, a booming economy with more mobile-phone subscribers than toilets, in fanning the development of drug-evading bacteria. As 30 million people fly out of the country annually, some are leaving with bowel-dwelling bugs that may cause deadly sepsis and defeat the most powerful antibiotic treatments.
“There is not even a light you can see at the end of this dark tunnel,” said Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases doctor who teaches at the Australian National University in Canberra. “People are dying from infections that are no longer treatable with available antibiotics.”
The researchers, led by Timothy Walsh of Cardiff University in Wales, collected 171 swabs from some of the drains that line New Delhi’s streets and 50 samples of public tap water in September and October. The samples were tested in the U.K. to identify the bacteria they contained and whether the germs had a gene known as NDM-1, which makes them resistant to a class of antibiotics-of-last resort known as carbapenems.
The gene was found in two of the drinking-water and 51 of the seepage samples, including in Vibrio cholerae, Shigella boydii and nine other bacteria species not previously reported to harbor the resistance mechanism.
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