Excreted Tamiflu Found in Rivers

October 3rd, 2009

Via: Science News:

The premier flu-fighting drug is contaminating rivers downstream of sewage-treatment facilities, researchers in Japan confirm. The source: urinary excretion by people taking oseltamivir phosphate, best known as Tamiflu.

Concerns are now building that birds, which are natural influenza carriers, are being exposed to waterborne residues of Tamiflu’s active form and might develop and spread drug-resistant strains of seasonal and avian flu.

Computer modeling has shown that OC should survive sewage treatment, notes Wolf von Tümpling Jr. of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, a federal institute in Magdeburg, Germany. Ghosh’s team is now the first to confirm this, he says. Von Tümpling’s own data show that once exposed to sunlight, OC will break down, albeit slowly. Concentrations would fall at best by half every three weeks, he says.

If correlations predicted by earlier studies are correct, concentrations measured at some river sites in the new Kyoto study seem “high enough to lead to antiviral resistance in waterfowl,” Ghosh says.

And the Kyoto team didn’t test during a pandemic, when Tamiflu prescription rates might be 10 times higher, von Tümpling notes.

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