Medicinal products in the environment: novel strategies reducing environmental exposure

There is an urgent need to reduce pharmaceutical levels in the environment due their impact on natural environment
and humans, as well as to comply with changing water quality regulations. Pharmaceuticals in the environment are
mainly attributed to the discharge of treated effluent from wastewater treatment works. The water sector is therefore
keen to advance knowledge in this area. The water sector and regulators have prioritised pharmaceutical compounds
for further investigation, which are prescribed in relation to conditions such as cardiovascular disease, obesity,
diabetes and depression/anxiety. Some of the conditions are related to lifestyle choices.
To reduce the load of pharmaceuticals in the environment, greater control and treatment at wastewater treatment
works could be needed. However, this would lead to a significant increase in the costs of wastewater treatment,
embedded and operational carbon in addition to an increase in water bills. This is in addition to the wider costs of
illness to society, which pays twice to exacerbate a problem. The current situation is therefore unsustainable and
needs disruptive change. The intention of this project is to provide the data and evidence to help prompt that
change.
This project will focus on the development of water fingerprinting approaches with utilisation of powerful mass
spectrometry techniques: triple quadrupole analysis for selected pharmaceutical targets and high-resolution mass
spectrometry for non-target/retrospective analysis of environmental and public health determinants.
Water fingerprinting has the potential to revolutionise health-care provision as it can provide real-time and costeffective
community-wide public health diagnostics, since urban water can be considered as a diagnostic medium for
the health status of a community and surrounding environment.
The project will:
1. Develop mass spectrometry focussed frameworks for spatiotemporal water fingerprinting
2. Undertake analysis of longitud inal samples collected in the Somer Valley (wastewater and receiving environment)
to establish spatiotemporal trends in environmental and public health determinants (pharmaceuticals, metabolites,
endogenously formed markers).
3. Undertake data triangulation to verify environmental and public health status and risk assessment
In order to develop and apply an approach as a measure of public health status in the studied region and tool for
evaluating the effectiveness of interventions.