Global risk of pharmaceutical contamination from highly populated developing countries

Potential ecological footprints of active pharmaceutical ingredients: an examination of risk factors in low-, middle- and high-income countries

“…Similar reports are available from other countries such as China [63], Taiwan [64] and Pakistan [55]. The presence of industrial wastewater in the sewage stream can be a significant contributor to the environmental load of APIs not only in lower income nations [60,62], but also globally [15,65]. A companion paper in this issue [15] discusses this aspect in the global context and demonstrates the point-source pollution implications of the API manufacturing sector.…”

“…The Asian API market is growing at 10 -15%, which is double the rate of the G7 countries [24] It is also a common practice to discharge untreated or poorly treated industrial wastewater into domestic wastewater channels in some Asian countries [60,61]. This is for at least two reasons, namely the lack of adequate treatment facilities and/or poor regulatory enforcement.…”

Food Adulteration and its Effect on Health

“…In a study it has been demonstrated that many pharmaceutical companies dispose there waste water and waste product without prior treatment directly to the nearby surface water and agriculture field thus contaminating surface water and agricultural product and producing multi drug resistant microbes and causing a threat to the health of the surrounding population 7 . Herbal medicine and herbal products are very ancient in our country and suppose to be very safe but several studies indicated that because of intentional or unintentional contamination or adulteration of the product these become injurious to health.…”

Residues and risks of veterinary antibiotics in protected vegetable soils following application of different manures

“…It has been estimated that the total cropping area of protected vegetables in China had reached 4.67 million ha by the end of 2010, double the area in 2004 (Yu, 2011). Hence, antibiotics contamination in such high frequency vegetable rotation farming systems has increasingly been of concern in recent years (Li et al, 2013a;Fang et al, 2014;Hou et al, 2015;Ur Rehman et al, 2015;Zhang et al, 2015;Wei et al, 2016), and many of these studies have focused on soil contamination by the antibiotics. In this study, soil samples with varied manure applications and vegetable planting durations were collected to investigate the veterinary antibiotics residue in the soils of intensive vegetable land, and to evaluate the potential environmental risk based on the current residual level.…”