Ranking prescribed pharmaceuticals in terms of environmental risk: Inclusion of hospital data and the importance of regular review.

Abstract

A newly available dataset on pharmaceuticals used in Scottish hospitals enabled an environmental risk assessment that includes hospital consumption of pharmaceuticals, as previous United Kingdom rankings have been based on community prescriptions only. Although health and the environment are devolved issues for the Scottish government, it is merited to consider a Scottish ranking separately; regional differentiation is particularly relevant in the spatial context of the European Commission's Water Framework Directive. Nine pharmaceuticals are identified as having a risk quotient greater than 1. Four of these, the antibacterials piperacillin, tazobactam, flucloxacillin, and ciprofloxacin, had high hospital contributions and had not been highlighted previously in rankings based on community prescriptions. Some drugs with a risk quotient < 0.1 are used almost exclusively in hospitals and could be more concentrated near effluents carrying hospital wastewater, where they may be of local concern. Although treating hospital effluents separately is a policy option, specifically including hospital consumption is important. Continually increasing the availability of ecotoxicological data and trends in consumption further contributes to a substantially different prioritization than in previous rankings. This leads the authors to conclude that regular review of risk is necessary.