African Water: Supporting African involvement in the EU Framework Programme.

Water researchers in developing countries have yet to take full advantage of the funding and collaborative research opportunities presented by the EU Framework Programme. There are a variety of reasons for this, such as insufficient information and a lack of previous experience. The African Water initiative aims to increase the involvement of African water researchers through a range of activities including communication and dissemination, capacity building and development, and complementary initiatives. The project has demonstrated that there is a demand for such sector-specific support activities. However, African Water is a small component of a much larger process of partnership between the developed and the less-developed countries of the world, involving many different European and African organisations working across political, institutional and technical domains, and complementing the wide range of actions already being undertaken

Protecting the environment from psychoactive drugs: Problems for regulators illustrated by the possible effects of tramadol on fish behaviour

© 2019 The Authors. There is concern that psychoactive drugs present in the aquatic environment could affect the behaviour of fish, and other organisms, adversely. There is considerable experimental support for this concern, although the literature is not consistent. To investigate why, fish were exposed to three concentrations of the synthetic opiate tramadol for 23–24 days, and their anxiolytic behaviour in a novel tank diving test was assessed both before and after exposure. The results were difficult to interpret. The positive control drug, the anti-depressant fluoxetine, produced the expected results: exposed fish explored the novel tank more, and swam more slowly while doing so. An initial statistical analysis of the results provided relatively weak support for the conclusion that both the low and high concentrations of tramadol affected fish behaviour, but no evidence that the intermediate concentration did. To gain further insight, UK and Japanese experts in ecotoxicology were asked for their independent opinions on the data for tramadol. These were highly valuable. For example, about half the experts replied that a low concentration of a chemical can cause effects that higher concentrations do not, although a similar number did not believe this was possible. Based both on the inconclusive effects of tramadol on the behaviour of the fish and the very varied opinions of experts on the correct interpretation of those inconclusive data, it is obvious that more research on the behavioural effects of tramadol, and probably all other psychoactive drugs, on aquatic organisms is required before any meaningful risk assessments can be conducted. The relevance of these findings may apply much more widely than just the environmental risk assessment of psychoactive drugs. They suggest that much more rigorous training of research scientists and regulators is probably required if consensus decisions are to be reached that adequately protect the environment from chemicals.Ecotoxicology Research Group, Brunel University London funded the fish experiments. We would also like to thank Dr. Matt Winter, University of Exeter, for his support with the behavioural analysis. This study was also supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) to a project on Joint Usage/Research Centre – Leading Academia in Marine and Environment Pollution Research (LaMer), and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grants-in-Aid (KAKENHI) for JSPS Fellows (JP26·2800), Scientific Research (A) (JP25257403), Scientific Research (A) (JP16H01784), and Young Scientists (JP18K18206)

The read-across hypothesis and environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society.Pharmaceuticals in the environment have received increased attention over the past decade, as they are ubiquitous in rivers and waterways. Concentrations are in sub-ng to low μg/L, well below acute toxic levels, but there are uncertainties regarding the effects of chronic exposures and there is a need to prioritise which pharmaceuticals may be of concern. The read-across hypothesis stipulates that a drug will have an effect in non-target organisms only if the molecular targets such as receptors and enzymes have been conserved, resulting in a (specific) pharmacological effect only if plasma concentrations are similar to human therapeutic concentrations. If this holds true for different classes of pharmaceuticals, it should be possible to predict the potential environmental impact from information obtained during the drug development process. This paper critically reviews the evidence for read-across, and finds that few studies include plasma concentrations and mode of action based effects. Thus, despite a large number of apparently relevant papers and a general acceptance of the hypothesis, there is an absence of documented evidence. There is a need for large-scale studies to generate robust data for testing the read-across hypothesis and developing predictive models, the only feasible approach to protecting the environment.BBSRC Industrial Partnership Award BB/ I00646X/1 and BBSRC Industrial CASE Partnership Studentship BB/I53257X/1 with AstraZeneca Safety Health and Environment Research Programme

Quantitative cross-species extrapolation between humans and fish: The case of the anti-depressant fluoxetine

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Fish are an important model for the pharmacological and toxicological characterization of human pharmaceuticals in drug discovery, drug safety assessment and environmental toxicology. However, do fish respond to pharmaceuticals as humans do? To address this question, we provide a novel quantitative cross-species extrapolation approach (qCSE) based on the hypothesis that similar plasma concentrations of pharmaceuticals cause comparable target-mediated effects in both humans and fish at similar level of biological organization (Read-Across Hypothesis). To validate this hypothesis, the behavioural effects of the anti-depressant drug fluoxetine on the fish model fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) were used as test case. Fish were exposed for 28 days to a range of measured water concentrations of fluoxetine (0.1, 1.0, 8.0, 16, 32, 64 μg/L) to produce plasma concentrations below, equal and above the range of Human Therapeutic Plasma Concentrations (HTPCs). Fluoxetine and its metabolite, norfluoxetine, were quantified in the plasma of individual fish and linked to behavioural anxiety-related endpoints. The minimum drug plasma concentrations that elicited anxiolytic responses in fish were above the upper value of the HTPC range, whereas no effects were observed at plasma concentrations below the HTPCs. In vivo metabolism of fluoxetine in humans and fish was similar, and displayed bi-phasic concentration-dependent kinetics driven by the auto-inhibitory dynamics and saturation of the enzymes that convert fluoxetine into norfluoxetine. The sensitivity of fish to fluoxetine was not so dissimilar from that of patients affected by general anxiety disorders. These results represent the first direct evidence of measured internal dose response effect of a pharmaceutical in fish, hence validating the Read-Across hypothesis applied to fluoxetine. Overall, this study demonstrates that the qCSE approach, anchored to internal drug concentrations, is a powerful tool to guide the assessment of the sensitivity of fish to pharmaceuticals, and strengthens the translational power of the cross-species extrapolation

Technique to detect microclimatic inhomogeneities in historical records of screen-level air temperature.

A new method to detect errors or biases in screen-level air temperature records at standard climate stations is developed and applied. It differs from other methods by being able to detect microclimatic inhomogeneities in time series. Such effects, often quite subtle, are due to alterations in the immediate environment of the station such as changes of vegetation, development (buildings, paving), irrigation, cropping, and even in the maintenance of the site and its instruments. In essence, the technique recognizes two facts: differences of thermal microclimate are enhanced at night, and taking the ratio of the nocturnal cooling at a pair of neighboring stations nullifies thermal changes that occur at larger-than-microclimatic scales. Such ratios are shown to be relatively insensitive to weather conditions. After transforming the time series using Hurst rescaling, which identifies long-term persistence in geophysical phenomena, cooling ratio records show distinct discontinuities, which, when compared against detailed station metadata records, are found to correspond to even minor changes in the station environment. Effects detected by this method are shown to escape detection by current generally accepted techniques. The existence of these microclimatic effects are a source of uncertainty in long-term temperature records, which is in addition to those presently recognized such as local and mesoscale urban development, deforestation, and irrigation. Copyright 2006 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or [email protected], Faculty ofGeography, Department ofReviewedFacult