The after‐life of drugs: a responsible care initiative for reducing their environmental impact

ew me the F give much thought, if any, to the fate of dications and other chemicals that pass though bodies of people and animals or are washed from their skins. The conventional wisdom is that the residual amounts of these substances are so minuscule that they are of little or no consequence. That penicillin was recovered from the urine of World War II soldiers was telling evidence that antibiotics, at least, do not just vanish. Even the discovery in 1976 that fish downstream from a Kansas sewerage plant were malformed as a result of exposure to the oestrogen, oestrone, related to contraceptive pill use, failed to change the mindset that the environmental burden of drugs was insignificant.1 Two decades then passed before German scientists, looking for herbicides in waterways, stumbled across a chemical they did not recognise.2 It was the cholesterollowering agent clofibrate, a close chemical relative of the weed killer 2,4-D. They investigated further and found analgesics (ibuprofen, diclofenac), antibiotics, lipid regulators (phenazone, fenofibrate), antiseptics, -blockers, oestradiol, anticonvulsants and x-ray contrast agents. Similar cocktails were subsequently found in the waterways of the United States.3 Mixtures of chemicals from human activity are always present in the environment. It is commonly assumed that individual chemicals do not interact. However, a study of the impact of pesticides on Californian frogs4 highlighted