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Reading 2 mins.
in collaboration with
Dr. Yves Dour (Doctor in Pharmacy)
Medical validation:
March 02, 2023
Once ingested, the drugs end up in the wastewater. Can we avoid them? How do they affect our health? The answers of Dr. Dour, doctor of pharmacy.
If we have known for a long time that drugs are easily found in our rivers and agricultural soils, we know less well on the other hand the health risks they induce. And yet: as rightly pointed out by two Spanish researchers in an article by The Conversation“The life of a drug does not end when it is ingested”.
All drugs end up in the environment
The drugs, degraded in the urine, the stools or even the perspiration, “can travel long distances and pass from rivers to underground waters and agricultural soils, where they can be taken up by crop plants and enter the food chain“, warn Raffaella Meffe and Ana de Santiago Martín, two researchers from the Water and Soil Quality Group, Imdea Agua.
Words, confirmed by Dr. Dour: “Any drug that degrades will inevitably end up in the environment in one way or another..”
And the least we can say is that they are numerous in nature: according to a study on pharmaceutical products detected in the environment (antibiotics, analgesics, hypolipidemics, estrogens, etc.) a A total of 631 different compounds have been identified in nearly 71 countries.
However, these substances represent a significant risk for humans.
“A drug is a toxin. Even degraded, it therefore carries obvious risks. For example, the birth control pill, degraded in the urine, persists in the environment for decades and decades.“, specifies the doctor of pharmacy.
Unused molecules must be returned to the pharmacy
In fact, it is necessary toreturn any unused or expired medicine, without its carton or wrapper, to the pharmacy – including unfinished eye drops”says Dr. Dour.
Same thing on the side ofmedications for animals that need to be taken to a veterinarian. This avoids finding them in the trash“.
If these drugs cannot be recycled (because of their expiry date, but also because of the cost of recycling), they still have a use: the pharmacist explains to us that since 2005 they have been used as “fuel” and allow heat the equivalent of whole quarters.
Good news, in the era of eco-responsibility.