Trace substances enter the food chain via the water cycle.
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Medicines are supposed to trigger biological effects even in the smallest doses. They do – also in the environment, as new studies show. Environmentalists are now calling for a different way of dealing with medicines.
GWhen doctors read the prescription pad or pharmacists read the medicine cabinet, they seldom keep all the consequences of this action in mind. In Germany, around 1.5 billion packs of medicines are sold in pharmacies every year, and in 2020 there were around 4.5 trillion doses worldwide. Medicines offer relief or even a cure for many diseases. But there is also another side: a large part of what goes into people also goes out again.
This is how many active ingredients and degradation products end up in the environment, as a team led by ecologist Peter Manning from the Senckenberg Research Institute shows in “Science” – and there are also mixtures of different substances, with complex consequences. What worries him most is what is still unknown, he says: environmental risk assessments are pending for 88 percent of all drugs that are said to have effects on human proteins. “So it’s really hard to say what the main environmental impacts of medicines are.”