Environmental pollutants lurk long after they 'disappear'

Terra Daily presents some intriguing research on pharmaceutical pollution: The health implications of polluting the environment weigh increasingly on our public consciousness, and pharmaceutical wastes continue to be a main culprit. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher says that current testing for these dangerous contaminants isn't going far enough.

Dr. Dror Avisar, head of the Hydro-Chemistry Laboratory at TAU's Department of Geography and the Human Environment, says that, when our environment doesn't test positive for the presence of a specific drug, we assume it's not there. But through biological or chemical processes such as sun exposure or oxidization, drugs break down, or degrade, into different forms - and could still be lurking in our water or soil.

In his lab, Dr. Avisar is doing extensive testing to determine how drugs degrade and identify the many forms they take in the environment. He has published his findings in Environmental Chemistry and the Journal of Environmental Science and Health.

Drug products have been in our environment for years, whether they derive from domestic wastewater, hospitals, industry or agriculture. But those who are searching for these drugs in the environment are typically looking for known compounds - parent drugs - such as antibiotics, pain killers, lipid controllers, anti-psychotic medications and many more.

"If we don't find a particular compound, we don't see contamination - but that's not true," Dr. Avisar explains. "We may have several degradation products with even higher levels of bioactivity." Not only do environmental scientists need to identify the degraded products, but they must also understand the biological-chemical processes that produce them in natural environments. When they degrade, compounds form new chemicals entirely, he cautions…

Where are they going? Phot0 by RayNata, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported