Pharma product waste poses health risks and leads to environmental degradation

The negative impact of the production of pharmaceutical products on the natural environment is well known. However, this remains largely unregulated, meaning the extremely toxic impact it has on both animals and humans continues with no clear end in sight.

Over the past 30 years, international organisations and the pharmaceutical industry have begun to notice that the detrimental impact pharma products have on the environment on a global scale.

Pharmaceutical products enter the environment at various stages of their life-cycle, but particularly during the production phase. One of the main threats is that discharging antibiotics into the environment can promote the natural development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that are harder to treat. Lord Jim O’Neill noted this trend in his 2016 UK government-funded independent Review on Antimicrobial Resistance.

Although it is a global issue, like other environmental issues, pharma pollution more directly and seriously affects those living near production plants whose water and food sources are contaminated with waste pharma products.

Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) Europe runs the Safer Pharma campaign to raise awareness of the negative relationship between pharma and the environment and challenge the healthcare industry to clean up its production.

“The production of both active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and finished dose antibiotics is concentrated in specific locations so the resulting point, source pollution, is in incredibly high concentrations and encourages the development of drug resistance,” says HCWH Europe pharmaceuticals policy officer Dr Adela Maghear. “This practice has a detrimental impact on vulnerable populations living near manufacturing facilities and wastewater treatment plants in these countries.”

The pollution of pharma products into the environment also adversely affects animals, particularly fish living in contaminated water. For example, a report published in science journal Nature in 2009 noted that ‘many of Europe’s rivers are home to male fish that are ‘intersex’ and so display female sexual characteristics, including female reproductive anatomy. Some males also produce vitellogenin, a protein normally found in eggs that can be induced in males by hormone exposure’.

Another large study of this problem in 2004 by the UK government’s Environment Agency found that 86% of male fish sampled at 51 sites around the country were intersex.” This phenomenon is blamed upon pollution of the contraceptive pill and its API, ethynyl oestradiol.