Hospital sewage fuelling antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Hyderabad drains: Study

Hospital sewage containing antibiotic residues is fuelling the spread of drug-resistant bacteria in Hyderabad’s drains and the Musi river, a study by CCMB and TIGS has found, warning of serious public health risks if sewage management systems are not improved.

Hyderabad: Hospital sewage, which finds its way to various water bodies, drains and eventually into the Musi river, have continued to pose a major threat to public health in Hyderabad. While significant work has been done to ensure hospital waste is treated before disposal, recent studies have indicated that the drainage waste from such facilities still has large amounts of untreated runoff with high-level antibiotics, which is a major public health hazard.

A recent study by researchers from Hyderabad and Bengaluru indicated that sampling sites within a two-kilometer radius of major mutli-specialty hospitals showed a significantly higher diversity of bacteria and other organisms resistant to antibiotics.

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Senior public health experts from Hyderabad have said that hospitals are hotspots where the strongest antibiotics (last-resort drugs) are used. When hospital laundry or untreated floor-wash enters municipal drains, they carry sub-lethal doses of these drugs. In the drains, these low doses don’t kill the bacteria; instead, they act as a ‘training camp’, allowing the survivors to develop and share resistance genes.

The sewage study by Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and TIGS, Bengaluru, tested water from 17 different locations, including 10 open drains, certain sections of Musi River and drains located within 2 kms of major hospitals.

The collected sewage from these sources consisted of bacteria that no longer respond to common antibiotics like Azithromycin and Tetracycline. Drains near hospitals showed a much wider variety of drug-resistant genes.

From the sewage, the researchers identified close to 89 different pathogens that are already evolving. A majority of these include bacteria responsible for causing Urinary Tract Infections (UTI), pneumonia and stomach infections.

Public health experts, familiar with the issue and on condition of anonymity, said that drainage system in Hyderabad and other urban cities have become safe haven for bacteria to evolve and improve their defenses. “If this continues, simple infections that we treat easily could become much harder to manage.

There is a definite need to evolve better sewage management systems,” they said.