High pharmaceutical pollution is contaminating the world's rivers

Anew study led by the University of York’s Centre of Excellence in Mass Spectrometry has found that pharmaceutical pollution is contaminating the world’s rivers to a greater extent.

The story was published in the journal, ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.’ The researchers studied rivers in over half of the world’s countries – with rivers in 36 of these countries having never previously been monitored for pharmaceuticals.

With their latest study, the researchers found that: Pharmaceutical pollution is contaminating water on every continent.

Strong correlations between the socioeconomic status of a country and higher pollution of pharmaceuticals in its rivers (with lower-middle-income nations the most polluted).

High levels of pharmaceutical pollution was most positively associated with regions of high median age as well as high local unemployment and poverty rates, The most polluted countries and regions of the world are the ones that have been researched the least (namely sub-Saharan Africa, South America and parts of southern Asia).

The activities most associated with the highest levels of pharmaceutical pollution included rubbish dumping along river banks, inadequate wastewater infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing, and the dumping of the contents of residual septic tanks into rivers.

The study revealed that a quarter of the sites contained contaminants (such as sulfamethoxazole, propranolol, ciprofloxacin and loratadine) at potentially harmful concentrations.

The researchers hope that by increasing the monitoring of pharmaceuticals in the environment, they can develop strategies to limit the effects potentially caused by the presence of pollutants.

The study included noteworthy rivers such as the Amazon, Mississippi, Thames and the Mekong. Water samples were obtained from sites spanning from a Yanomami Village in Venezuela, where modern medicines are not used, to some of the most populated cities on the planet, such as Delhi, London, New York, Lagos, Las Vegas, and Guangzhou.

Areas of political instability such as Baghdad, the Palestinian West Bank and Yaounde in Cameroon were also included. The climates where samples were obtained varied from high altitude alpine tundra in Colorado and Polar Regions in Antarctica, to Tunisian deserts.

While previous studies have monitored active pharmaceuticals ingredients (APIs) in rivers, these have ignored many of the countries of the world, have typically measured only a select few contaminants and employed different analytical methods. Cumulatively, this has made it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective.