Croatian ‘Superbug River’ Puts Pharma Pollution Under the Microscope

30 January 2020

From a dirt road on the north bank of the Sava river, the scene is bucolic: lush foliage, a pebble beach, sky on the water. Then you see the concrete drain, half-hidden under ivy. The air reeks of sewage. Brown foam clots in the shallows.

For microbiologist Nikolina Udikovic Kolic, what is most worrying about this spot 15 kilometres upstream from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, is not what you can see and smell. It is what she found lurking in sediment around the drain — microscopic and possibly deadly.

“I felt like I was doing some kind of police work,” she said, recalling the hours crouched in the mud by Croatia’s largest river, scooping sludge into sample bottles, during a year of fieldwork in 2016.

Udikovic Kolic, head of the Laboratory for Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology at the state-run Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, documented alarming levels of two common antibiotics: azithromycin and erythromycin.

Further reading: Balkan Insight

Author(s): Vedrana Simicevic

Clean Environment