Researcher warns of lingering environmental pollutants

Pharmaceutical drugs degrade and form new,
potentially harmful chemicals, expert warns.

Environmental pollutants lurk long after they supposedly "disappear," and ridding the environment of pharmaceutical waste not as easy as it seems, warns a Tel Aviv University researcher.

A growing number of people worry about the health implications of polluting the environment, 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.

Drugs react with environment, form new chemicals

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.

Tests only focus on original drugs

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."

Resulting chemicals can be toxic

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.

Dr. Avisar and his research group have been working to simulate environmental conditions identical to our natural environment, down to the last molecule, in order to identify the conditions under which compounds degrade, how they degrade, and the resulting chemical products.

Factors that need to be considered:

• Sun exposure
• Water composition
• Temperatures
• pH levels
• Organic content

Using amoxicillin, a common antibiotic prescribed for bacterial infections such as strep throat, as a test case, Dr. Avisar has successfully identified nine degradation products with different levels of stability. Two may even be toxic, he notes.

"Chemicals do not simply disappear — we must understand what they've turned into,” Dr. Avisar warns. “We are dealing with a whole new range of contaminants.”

Read the full press release.
Update July 29: New model predicts environmental effects of pharmaceutical products.

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