Nasty Water, round 2

[max]

Big Pharma's Factories Dump Pharmaceuticals Into Rivers, Streams

By Mike Adams, January 26, 2009 | Key concepts: Pharmaceutical pollution, Big Pharma and Water supply


Many of the pharmaceuticals consumed in the United States are made in India, where labor is cheap and environmental laws are lenient on powerful corporations. U.S. drug companies are exploiting this situation to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of high-profit pharmaceuticals in India, where ingredients purchased for a few cents can be re-sold to U.S. health patients for hundreds of dollars (the markup on some drugs is literally over 500,000%).

There's something else Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about its drug operations in India: Big Pharma's manufacturing facilities dump millions of doses of toxic pharmaceutical chemicals directly into India's waterways.

Researchers were recently stunned to discover that 100 pounds of a powerful antibiotic called ciprofloxacin was being dumped into a local stream every day! That's a quantity of antibiotics that could treat an entire city of 90,000 people every day.

But that's not all: The same waterway contained an astonishing 21 pharmaceutical chemicals reports the Associated Press, some at levels that were 150 times the highest levels of contamination found in U.S. waterways. (And even the levels found in the U.S. were quite alarming.)

[zacinnc78]

this is truly horrifying

[super_forehand]

I imagine we shouldn't be too surprized...

[gastro54]

Pollution is without a doubt reprehensible and greater sanctions should be put on companies with practices detrimental to the environment.

However, there is more to the cost of pharmaceuticals than just the raw ingredients; in fact, the raw ingredients are by far the cheapest component in drug production.

It literally takes hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the scientists, do the research, conduct clinical trials, revise the drug, conduct further trials, etc to get a drug US-approved.

The cost of pharmaceuticals also has to cover lost capital that was sunk into the research put into and failed clinical trials of noneffective drugs.

[meowmix]

^I think you're UNDERestimating the cost of actually get a drug out onto the market. My dad works for one of the larger pharmaceutical companies and he says that it costs close to a BIL from inception to production line... And that's not really factoring all the drugs that fail out. Supposedly, about 1/4 of the bil goes for research, 1/2 for clinical trials (expensive stuff...) and the rest for "other". Kind of shows that we NEED those large companies...

[Okazaki Fragment]

^^^^

Another cost not mentioned: A model costs $X dollars to hire. A teacher costs $X dollars to hire. Now imagine if you had to hire a girl that is both hot and smart. That costs a ton of $$$$$.

[mary fierce]

Is the dumping by the pharmaceutical companies any different from what Indian companies or companies from other nations do? The article does not make clear whether these companies are doing what ALL companies do in India because of lax regs. Also, the part about dumping cipro really makes no sense; cipro is an important product and quite profitable; why would they manufacture it to excess and then dump it????

[max]

Interesting to me that a number of responses attack the messenger rather than the content of the message; for me, I'm concerned about the Indian people.

[ollinger]

Given the sanitary conditions in India, a hundred pounds of cipro in a stream might do more good than harm.
As for the messenger, it's odd that he's grinding just one particular axe. Industrial pollution is widespread in India and endemic to many industries. Focusing on pharmaceuticals is underinclusive and therefore shoddy journalism. Should we be dismayed and galvanized to action by all of this? That's for the people of India to deal with.