Human pharmaceuticals are increasingly detected in environments around the world, with growing international calls to mitigate the ecological and human health risks posed by these novel entities. Exposure to pharmaceutical pollutants can negatively affect the behaviour, reproduction, and health of wildlife, contributing towards declining ecological health and global biodiversity loss. Pharmaceuticals in the environment are also driving rising levels of antimicrobial resistance, a major public health threat. Developing strategies to mitigate these public and environmental health risks has been greatly limited by diverse and often conflicting stakeholder interests and the need to retain the major human health and socioeconomic benefits that pharmaceuticals provide. In this Personal View, we propose a multistakeholder, systems-based approach for high-income countries to develop transformational national mitigation strategies. Applying this approach to a UK case study highlighted the growing risks caused by the unsustainability of the current UK health-care pharmaceutical system and enabled us to identify 37 synergistic intervention points that target both the tangible easy wins and the deep-rooted social drivers of the issue. We believe our approach will support high-income countries in minimising the public and environmental health risks associated with pharmaceutical pollution, by driving long-term sustainability across the pharmaceutical lifecycle, for a positive pharmaceutical future.

An article out today in ES&T Letters raises concerns that tools designed to assess and report on pharmaceutical environmental sustainability are overlooking pollution.

Pharma Pollution Hub members Kelly Thornber, Paul Southall and Charles Tyler are co-authors on a letter written by clinical academics at the University of Exeter, raising concerns over the environmental impacts of the increasing use of propofol in anaesthesia in UK healthcare.

Kelly Thornber, Co-Director of the Pharma Pollution Hub, has published an article in Health Europa Quarterly, discussing the challenges of addressing pharmaceutical pollution from healthcare.

Academics from across the University of Exeter have joined forces with thought leaders from other universities, industry, government and non-profit organisations, to call for societal-wide action on reducing pharmaceutical pollution from human healthcare.