How long can ciprofloxacin remain a useful drug with this going on?

The Associated Press reported today that the 90,000 people in a small city in India are consuming therapeutic levels of the powerful antibiotic simply by drinking the local water. Researchers said not only were residents of Patancheru, which is home to the waste disposal plant where more than 90 Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing firms send their wastes, consuming high levels of cipro, but. . .

. . . the supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment.

The danger -- besides to the people suffering unnecessary side effects from ingesting powerful drugs when they're not sick -- is that bugs in the environment will quickly develop resistance to the antibiotics in the stew. "If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you're treated for everything. The question is for how long?" said chemist Klaus Kuemmerer at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany, who was not involved in the study.