Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world. This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective. Furthermore, comparison of the existing data, generated for different studies/regions/continents, is challenging due to the vast differences between the analytical methodologies employed. Here, we present a global-scale study of API pollution in 258 of the world’s rivers, representing the environmental influence of 471.4 million people across 137 geographic regions. Samples were obtained from 1,052 locations in 104 countries (representing all continents and 36 countries not previously studied for API contamination) and analyzed for 61 APIs. Highest cumulative API concentrations were observed in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and South America. The most contaminated sites were in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The most frequently detected APIs were carbamazepine, metformin, and caffeine (a compound also arising from lifestyle use), which were detected at over half of the sites monitored. Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, pharmaceutical pollution poses a global threat to environmental and human health, as well as to delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

semivolatile persistent organic pollutants have the potential to reach remote environments, such as the Arctic ocean, through atmospheric transport and deposition. Here we show that this transport of polychlorinated biphenyls to the Arctic ocean is strongly retarded by the oceanic biological pump. A simultaneous sampling of atmospheric, seawater and plankton samples was performed in July 2007 in the Greenland Current and Atlantic sector of the Arctic ocean. The atmospheric concentrations declined during atmospheric transport over the Greenland Current with estimated half-lives of 1-4 days. These short half-lives can be explained by the high airto-water net diffusive flux, which is similar in magnitude to the estimated settling fluxes in the water column. Therefore, the decrease of atmospheric concentrations is due to sequestration of atmospheric polychlorinated biphenyls by enhanced air-water diffusive fluxes driven by phytoplankton uptake and organic carbon settling fluxes (biological pump).

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Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a geochemically relevant family of semivolatile compounds originating from fossil fuels, biomass burning, and their incomplete combustion, as well as biogenic sources. Even though PAHs are ubiquitous in the environment, there are no previous studies of their occurrence in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic atmosphere. Here we show the gas and aerosol phase PAHs concentrations obtained from three sampling cruises in the Southern Ocean (Weddell, Bellingshausen, and South Scotia Seas), and two sampling campaigns at Livingston Island (Southern Shetlands). This study shows an important variability of the atmospheric concentrations with higher concentrations in the South Scotia and northern Weddell Seas than in the Bellingshausen Sea. The assessment of the gas-particle partitioning of PAHs suggests that aerosol elemental carbon contribution is modest due to its low concentrations. Over the ocean, the atmospheric concentrations do not show a temperature dependence, which is consistent with an important role of long-range atmospheric transport of PAHs. Conversely, over land at Livingston Island, the PAHs gas phase concentrations increase when the temperature increases, consistently with the presence of local diffusive sources. The use of fugacity samplers allowed the determination of the air-soil and air-snow fugacity ratios of PAHs showing that there is a significant volatilization of lighter molecular weight PAHs from soil and snow during the austral summer. The higher volatilization, observed in correspondence of sites where the organic matter content in soil is higher, suggests that there may be a biogenic source of some PAHs. The volatilization of PAHs from soil and snow is sufficient to support the atmospheric occurrence of PAHs over land but may have a modest regional influence on the atmospheric occurrence of PAHs over the Southern Ocean.