You’re not feeling well, you take some medicine, you feel better. End of story? No. Instead, some proportion of some medicines, or their components, passes through your body and makes their way into the environment, potentially contaminating ecosystems and harming people and wildlife.
Pharmaceutical pollutants derive from a number of sources, not just from people taking pills. Livestock in the United States’ industrialized farming system are administered a huge amount of pharmaceuticals, primarily antibiotics. Aquaculture systems and pharmaceutical manufacturing sites provide other pathways for chemicals to pass into wastewater treatment systems, soil, surface water and groundwater.
To understand the unintended effects of our modern agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, toxicologists and environmental chemists — including Bowdoin Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies Dharni Vasudevan — are studying the afterlives of pharmaceuticals and related chemicals. “As an environmental chemist, I’m concerned about the fate of these chemicals in the environment,” Vasudevan said. “And the reason I care about their fate is because I care about exposure risk to humans and ecosystems.” Read more about Vasudevan’s research and her new NSF grant.