Suchergebnisse

Pharmaceuticals are known to occur widely in the environment of industrialized countries. In developing countries, more monitoring results have recently become available, but a concise picture on the prevailing concentrations is still elusive. In a comprehensive literature review of 1016 original publications and 150 review articles, we compiled measured environmental concentrations of human and veterinary pharmaceutical substances reported worldwide in surface water, groundwater, tap/drinking water, manure, soil, and other environmental matrices in a systematic database. As result, 123,761 database entries have been made. Pharmaceuticals or their transformation products have been detected in the environment of 71 countries covering all five UN regions. In total, 631 different pharmaceuticals have been found above the detection limits of the analytical methods employed, revealing regional patterns. 17 substances have been detected in all five UN regions. For example, the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac has been detected in the environment of 50 countries, in several locations at ecotoxicologically relevant concentrations. Urban wastewater seems to be the dominant emission pathway of pharmaceuticals globally, whereas emissions from industrial production, hospitals, agriculture, and aquaculture are important locally. We conclude that pharmaceuticals in the environment are a global challenge calling for multi-stakeholder and multi-sector approaches to prevent, reduce, and manage pharmaceuticals entering the environment, such as the recently adopted new emerging policy issue under the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM). We provide an overview of strategies for action proposed in the literature and examine them with respect to their effectiveness in terms of mitigating the entry and occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment and their potential to be addressed under SAICM.