De Souza

Escher

Hamer

Huber

Huschek

Jones

Kümmerer

Lienert

Mehinto

Parolini

Santos

Schuster

Sebastine

Verlicchi

Weissbrodt

English

Karin Helwig

Colin Hunter

Moyra McNaughtan

Joanne Roberts

Ole Pahl

Crossref

Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry

Ranking prescribed pharmaceuticals in terms of environmental risk: Inclusion of hospital data and the importance of regular review

A newly available dataset on pharmaceuticals used in Scottish hospitals enabled an environmental risk assessment that includes hospital consumption of pharmaceuticals, as previous United Kingdom rankings have been based on community prescriptions only. Although health and the environment are devolved issues for the Scottish government, it is merited to consider a Scottish ranking separately; regional differentiation is particularly relevant in the spatial context of the European Commission's Water Framework Directive. Nine pharmaceuticals are identified as having a risk quotient greater than 1. Four of these, the antibacterials piperacillin, tazobactam, flucloxacillin, and ciprofloxacin, had high hospital contributions and had not been highlighted previously in rankings based on community prescriptions. Some drugs with a risk quotient &lt;0.1 are used almost exclusively in hospitals and could be more concentrated near effluents carrying hospital wastewater, where they may be of local concern. Although treating hospital effluents separately is a policy option, specifically including hospital consumption is important. Continually increasing the availability of ecotoxicological data and trends in consumption further contributes to a substantially different prioritization than in previous rankings. This leads the authors to conclude that regular review of risk is necessary. Environ Toxicol Chem 2016;35:1043-1050. © 2015 SETA

Helwig, Karin

Hunter, Colin

McNaughtan, Moyra

Roberts, Joanne

Pahl, Ole

ResearchOnline@GCU

Ranking prescribed pharmaceuticals in terms of environmental risk: inclusion of hospital data and the importance of regular review

https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/files/24517332/K.Helwig_Ranking_Pharmaceuticals_with_SI_.pdf

Ranking prescribed pharmaceuticals in terms of environmental risk: inclusion of hospital data and the importance of regular review

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ResearchOnline@GCU