Pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance.

🔑 Key Findings

• While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world.
• This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective.
• Additionally, comparison of the existing data, generated for different studies/regions/continents, is challenging due to the vast differences between the analytical methodologies employed.

🔗 Related Resources