Pharmazeutische Wirkstoffe und Umweltschutz

On 26 April this year the German Environmental Advisory Council (SRU) published a statement on ‘Pharmaceuticals in the environment’ and pointed considerable need for action to understand and to reduce the risks from diffuse pharmaceutical inputs in the environment. On the one hand, it is urgently necessary to improve the database for environmental risk assessments; on the other hand measures should already be taken to minimize harmful inputs. Fortunately, the new regulations for an application for an authorization to market new pharmaceuticals require an environmental risk assessment. However, there is a lack of information on possible impacts from long time admitted medicines which may be responsible for harmful active substances detectable in the environment. To remove this data deficit, a European programme for risk evaluation of old pharmaceuticals should be established. It is necessary for an adequate risk assessment to look at all impacts of one active substance or all substances same-directed in their active potential summativ and to generate regularly consumption data in particular for the use of veterinary products. The hot spots of contamination are the introduction of large scale volumes of active pharmaceutical ingredients for human use like diclofenac and carbamazepin as well as hormones into surface waters, as well as the application of antibiotics-loaded economic fertilizers on soils. Not to be neglected is the application of antiparasitics in animals kept on pasture. With the assessment of the use of pharmaceuticals for all purposes special attention is needed on antibiotic resistance. For the mitigation of environmental exposures there are exposures measures necessary to reduce use of antibiotics in farming, for the application of new effective technologies in treatment sewage — as for example ozonation, filtration with activated carbon or membrane filtration — as well as for the labelling of environmentally harmful medicinal products.