LONDON: Commonly used antibiotics may be harming the good microbes that are essential to a healthy environment, a study warns.
When people take antibiotics, their bodies break down and metabolise only a portion of the drugs. The rest is excreted and enters wastewater.
As wastewater treatment plants are not designed to fully remove antibiotic or other pharmaceutical compounds, many of those compounds reach natural systems where they can accumulate and harm microbes in nature, researchers said.