Global Synthesis and Critical Evaluation of Pharmaceutical Data Sets Collected from River Systems
By S. Hughes, P. Kay, L. Brown. Environmental Science and Technology, 2012
698 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Pharmaceuticals have emerged as a major group of environmental contaminants over the past decade but relatively little is known about their occurrence in freshwaters compared to other pollutants. We present a global-scale analysis of the presence of 203 pharmaceuticals across 41 countries and show that contamination is extensive due to widespread consumption and subsequent disposal to rivers. There are clear regional biases in current understanding with little work outside North America, Europe, and China, and no work within Africa. Within individual countries, research is biased around a small number of populated provinces/states and the majority of research effort has focused upon just 14 compounds. Most research has adopted sampling techniques that are unlikely to provide reliable and representative data. This analysis highlights locations where concentrations of antibiotics, cardiovascular drugs, painkillers, contrast media, and antiepileptic drugs have been recorded well above thresholds known to cause toxic effects in aquatic biota. Studies of pharmaceutical occurrence and effects need to be seen as a global research priority due to increasing consumption, particularly among societies with aging populations. Researchers in all fields of environmental management need to work together more effectively to identify high risk compounds, improve the reliability and coverage of future monitoring studies, and develop new mitigation measures.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Pollution, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4023a063d1992590358e814f28586db85be63a4
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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
In Pollution
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Emerging threats and persistent conservation challenges for freshwater biodiversity (2018, background): “As an example, surveys of wastewater-impacted rivers show the global presence of pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, antivirals and antidepressants, with antibiotics being the most frequently detected (Hughes, Kay & Brown, 2013).”
- Pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers (2022, neutral): “For countries with data, information is typically only available for a small number of APIs with studies rarely monitoring more than 20 contaminants in a single method (7, 9).”
- Pharmaceuticals in the environment—Global occurrences and perspectives (2016, background): “Although similar conclusions have been drawn in other publications [31,35,49,50], the global perspective of the established database adds a new dimension to this issue.”
- Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in the freshwater aquatic environment (2017, neutral): “formation products with unknown toxicity and persistence may still be present in the final effluent as well as in receiving water bodies [80].”