Extent of pharmaceutical pollution on every continent on Earth revealed

The global extent of pharmaceutical pollution has been revealed in a new study that has also shone a spotlight on contamination hotspots around the world. A lab in York in the UK worked with samples from 259 rivers, encompassing 104 countries on every continent to build-up a picture of contamination of waterways with drugs.

‘This is the first time, using one huge dataset, we are able to take a comparative view of pharmaceutical pollution across the world,’ says John Wilkinson at the University of York, UK, where water samples were shipped by collaborators for high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. The survey involved the cooperation of 86 institutions worldwide, with a consortium of 127 researchers. Previously, extensive data on pharma pollution was only available for the US, Europe and China.