The first large-scale metadata analysis of drugs in hospital wastewater throughout the world has been carried out by a group of Spanish experts. The conclusion drawn from it after monitoring is the determination of more than 300 pharmaceutical products (314) in hospital effluents from 38 countries of the five continents.
Does this mean that hospitals are poorly managing this waste?Gorka Orive, Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria (UPV/EHU), one of the authors, qualifies this medium that they have limited themselves “to carrying out a descriptive review. To carry out an analysis of the risk that may be many more factors need to be taken into account, for example, Where does this water end up: in a wastewater treatment plant (EDAR) or does it go to the river and the sea?“.
The investigation Drugs in hospital wastewater: an analysis of the pharmaceutical databasefromUBA has seen the light in the publication Environmental Science and Pollution Research. If we go into detail, 271 compounds have been detected at least once and 47 are considered dangerous. Specifically, the five drugs detected in more studies are ciprofloxacin (38), sulfamethoxazole (36), diclofenac (34), ibuprofen (29) and trimethoprim (27).
In this sense, Orive adds that “many drugs considered dangerous are used in hospitals.” And he remembers, as specified in the study, that “many drugs have not been measured”so it would not be correct to say that these are the ones that pollute the most.
For this research they have found more than 100references on drug monitoring in wastewater from hospitals, using the database Pharmaceuticals in the environmentfrom the German Environment Agency (UBA), updated as of 2021. This indicates that, in general, almost 1,000 active ingredients have been found in the environment. Almost half of the studies that have monitored wastewater are European (50), followed by Asia (25), America (22), Africa (7) and Oceania (2). The most prolific countries are Brazil (11), Spain (8), China (7) and France (6).