Common drugs pollute rivers on every continent
For more than 20 years scientists have known that the drugs we take, for maladies ranging from headaches to diabetes, eventually make their way into our waterways—where they can harm the ecosystem and potentially promote antibiotic resistance. … A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA provides a more comprehensive look. A network of 127 scientists sampled 258 rivers in 104 countries for 61 different chemicals, producing “a sort of ‘pharmaceutical fingerprint’ of nearly half a billion people across all the world’s continents,” says study lead author John L. Wilkinson, an environmental chemist at the University of York in England.