The Guardian notes that our effluvia is choking our support systems:
River systems around the world are coursing with over-the-counter and prescription drugs waste which harms the environment, researchers have found.
If trends persist, the amount of pharmaceutical effluence leaching into waterways could increase by two-thirds before 2050, scientists told the European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna on Tuesday.
“A large part of the freshwater ecosystems is potentially endangered by the high concentration of pharmaceuticals,” said Francesco Bregoli, a researcher at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, and leader of an international team that developed a method for tracking drug pollution “hotspots”.
For an engineer, this sounded interesting.
Bregoli and his team developed a computer model to predict current and future pharma pollution based on criteria such as population densities, sewage systems and drugs sales.
They compared the results to data gathered from 1,400 spot measurements of diclofenac toxicity taken from around the world. Most of the data points were in Europe and North America.
Pollution levels are likely to be substantially higher in much of Latin America, Africa and Asia where less than a quarter of waste water is treated, and with technology unable to filter out most pharmaceuticals.
Technology alone cannot solve the problem, said Bregoli.
“We need a substantial reduction in consumption,” he said.
Lots of options for reducing consumption, but none are all that attractive.
- Clean the water.
- Take fewer drugs.
- Stop issuing drugs.
- Reduce the population which may take drugs.
- Reduce the population.
- Find ways to better regulate dosages so that less excess – much less excess – is shed by the patients.
Neither do they seem all that likely to occur in the short-term, except, sadly, #5.
