Maintenance of Environmental Sustainability Through Microbiological Study of Pharmaceutical Solid Wastes

Abstract

Untreated waste materials discharged from the pharmaceutical industries due to lack of legislative regulations may cast the unfavorable consequences within the environment. The present study endeavored to stress the proliferation of harmful microorganisms in both treated and untreated pharmaceutical wastes along with the assessment of the drug resistance patterns of the isolates. The existence of the total viable bacteria and fungi was estimated up to 109 and 106 colony forming unit (cfu)/mL, respectively, in treated pharmaceutical wastes. For the untreated wastes, the bacterial and the fungal load were 106 and 103 cfu/mL, respectively. Both categories of samples were found to be contaminated with an array of pathogenic bacteria including Klebsiella spp., Vibrio spp., Bacillus spp., and Staphylococcus spp. Interestingly, an elevated range of pathogenic contamination was noticed in the treated samples up to 105 cfu/mL while a comparatively reduced microbial load was observed in the untreated samples within a range of 102–104 cfu/mL. Most of the isolates exhibited resistance against commonly used antibiotics while several isolates showed multi‐drug resistance. Conversely, almost all untreated samples were found to exhibit in vitro anti‐bacterial activity against eight categories of laboratory isolates tested.

Microbiological investigation and determination of the antimicrobial potential of cow dung samples

“…Study area, sampling and sample processing. Eight different types of fresh cow dung samples of Bangladeshi cow breed were randomly collected from different cow farm located at khillgaon, Savar, Gabtoli and Rampura of Dhaka city, Bangladesh following standard protocol (10,11) For the identification and enumeration of bacteria including pathogenic ones and fungi, 10g of each sample was added with 90 ml of normal saline and diluted up to 10 -7 for all the samples following standard guidelines (11)(12)(13)(14). Isolation and identification of bacteria Estimation of total viable bacteria, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella spp., Staphylococcus spp.…”

“…and Pseudomonas spp., consecutively. All the plates were then incubated at 37 C for 24 hours (11)(12)(13)(14)(15).…”

Prevalence of Methicillin and Vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus on the touch screen of automated teller machines in Dhaka city.

“…Among the 80% of MRSA, 62.5% showed resistance against vancomycin as VRSA (Table 5). As described in earlier studies, dissemination of such MRSA & VRSA strain through the dirty surface of the ATMs devices is the main reason to produce several diseases 19,34 .…”

Effectiveness of Antibiotics: Anti-Bacterial Activity or Microbial Drug Resistance?

“…However, the basic mechanisms of resistance against antibiotics was characterized by the inactivation of the drug, alteration of the target, reduced cellular uptake, and the increased efflux 1 . Afterwards the reasoning behind such resistance were unraveled through the findings of the horizontal acquirement of genes imparting drug-resistance into the bacterial cells; or by the mobilization via insertion sequences, transposons and the conjugative plasmids, by the homologous recombination of the foreign DNA into the chromosomal DNA; or by mutations in the different loci of chromosome 1,[16][17] . It is to be pondered that the antibiotic itself may play a role as the selective marker and secondly the resistance gene acts as the vehicle of resistance; and the resultant impact over time and antibiotic concentration is noticed as the resistance of microorganisms against different antibiotics 15 .…”