Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Aquatic Environment: How Can Regions at Risk be Identified in the Future?

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are an indispensable component of a healthy society. However, they are well established environmental contaminants, and many can elicit biological disruption in exposed organisms. It is now a decade since the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) published its landmark review of PPCPs in the environment (Boxall et al., 2012). Here we discuss key research priorities for the next 10 years with an aim on how regions where PPCPs pose the greatest risk to environmental and human health, either now or in the future, can be identified. Specifically, we discuss why this problem is of importance and review our current understanding of PPCPs in the aquatic environment. Foci include PPCP occurrence and what drives their environmental emission as well as our ability to both quantify and model their distribution. We highlight critical areas for future research including the involvement of citizen science for environmental monitoring and using modelling techniques to bridge the gap between research capacity and needs. As prioritisation of regions in need of environmental monitoring is needed to assess future/current risk, we also propose four criteria with which this may be achieved. Applying these criteria to available monitoring data we narrow the focus on where monitoring efforts for PPCPs are most urgent. Specifically, 19 cities across Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia were highlighted as priorities for future environmental monitoring and risk characterisation. Together, this informs our suggestion of four priority research questions for the next 10 years.

Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: What Progress Has Been Made in Addressing the Big Research Questions?

“…Despite the many advances in our understanding of the impacts of PPCPs on the natural environment and how to manage them, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge; and all of the special issue papers highlight areas where more work is needed. Many of the papers stress the need for broadening the research to include a much wider range of geographical areas (Oldenkamp et al, 2024;Wilkinson et al, 2024), chemicals and chemical classes (Ankley et al, 2024;Carter et al, 2024), and species and life stages (Brooks et al, 2024).…”

“…Work on PPCPs in the coming decade will benefit from a wide range of "new" methodologies that are introduced in papers in the special issue. These include citizen science to monitor PPCPs (Wilkinson et al, 2024); non-invasive monitoring tools for monitoring uptake into and effects on organisms (Bean et al, 2024); new approach methodologies that minimize the use of animals (Ankley et al, 2024;Bean et al, 2024;Langan et al, 2024); genetic modification methods, such as clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, coupled with new imaging methods (Margiotta-Casaluci et al, 2024); omics methods (Brooks et al, 2024;Manaia et al, 2024); high-throughput experimental testing methods-for example, high-throughput absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion tests (ADME; Kidd et al, 2024;Margiotta-Casaluci et al, 2024); machine learning approaches (Carter et al, 2024;Margiotta-Casaluci et al, 2024); and other advanced modeling methods such as Bayesian physiologically based pharmacokinetic models, population-based ADME simulators, hidden Markov models, and population ecology and bioenergetic tools (Brooks et al, 2024;Manaia et al, 2024;Margiotta-Casaluci et al, 2024).…”

“…In the past decade, the number of PPCPs monitored in the environment has risen, and there has been increasing access to data on the occurrence of PPCPs across the globe (Wilkinson et al, 2024). Alongside this improvement, there have been significant developments in exposure modeling approaches, such as ePiE, PhATE, STREAM-EU, and GLOBAL-FATE, which provide exposure predictions at much finer scales than before (Wilkinson et al, 2024). This progress has allowed risks of PPCPs to be assessed more broadly and supported the identification of the drivers of risks in different regions of the world (Wilkinson et al, 2024).…”

Towards Precision Ecotoxicology: Leveraging Evolutionary Conservation of Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Product Targets to Understand Adverse Outcomes Across Species and Life Stages

“…Developing linkages across biological organization from the laboratory to the field Improving the precision of ecotoxicology and translation of the scientific advances within risk-based evaluations involves improving our understanding of where, when, and how much PPCPs and other contaminants are being consumed and entering the environment. It further involves understanding what species are most likely to be exposed and/or most vulnerable at the population level, as noted by another key question identified by Boxall et al (2012) and further explored elsewhere in this special issue (Wilkinson et al, 2024). The primary route of the introduction of PPCPs to the environment has historically been attributed to wastewater treatment effluent and biosolids (Xia et al, 2005).…”

“…More recently, the importance of landfill leachate and recreational swimming/snorkeling have emerged as additional point sources for PPCPs (Chung et al, 2018;Mitchelmore et al, 2019;Yu et al, 2020); however, the contribution of these sources to the overall PPCP concentrations in environment matrices remains unknown. For example, PPCP concentrations vary widely within and among lentic, lotic, and terrestrial systems (Meyer et al, 2019;Wilkinson et al, 2024), resulting in a disproportionate exposure of species inhabiting these different systems (Bouzas-Monroy et al, 2022).…”