[Pharmaceuticals as pollution]

Abstract

The pharmaceuticals we humans use to treat illness and disease typically enter the aquatic environment via the sewer network and wastewater treatment works. Understanding the risks posed to the aquatic environment by these chemicals requires an understanding of the concentrations that exist in the environment and whether they are sufficiently high to have adverse effects on aquatic organisms. The main source of pharmaceuticals to wastewater treatment works is pharmaceuticals used by the general population. Only a small contribution is believed to come from hospitals. The predicted environmental concentrations of pharmaceuticals suggest that certain pharmaceuticals may pose a risk to the environment, but measurement of the actual concentrations present in effluents and recipient waters suggest that sophisticated wastewater treatment is effective for significantly reducing effluent concentrations, and that environmental concentrations of pharmaceuticals, in the Oslo Fjord, for example, are generally low. Humans also excrete the metabolites of the pharmaceuticals that they have used and these too may be released into the environment, sometimes in greater concentrations than the parent drug. The occurrence of most pharmaceuticals and their metabolites in the environment poses little acute environmental risk. However, the effects of long-term chronic exposure to these compounds are still poorly understood and the long-terms risks to the environment are still not clear. What is clear is that certain pharmaceuticals pose a greater environmental risk than others, and that where possible this knowledge should be used to inform users of more environmentally friendly alternatives.