Pharmaceuticals in Municipal Wastewater Webinar

There are thousands of pharmaceuticals in use today. Some pharmaceuticals have been found in water and have raised concerns about the potential risks they pose to both humans and our ecosystems. These pharmaceuticals tend to make their way in to our waters primarily through excretion of active drugs directly from patients and subsequent incomplete removal of those pharmaceuticals from our wastewater during wastewater treatment. This webinar described our estimates of potential risks to people as well as aquatic life by combining aquatic concentration information with available dose-response data. This analysis includes data from our recent study of pharmaceutical concentrations in effluent samples from 50 very large municipal wastewater plants located across the United States. Contributors: Mitch Kostich, Angela Batt, Susan Glassmeyer, and Jim Lazorchak.

Webinar Presentation Slides

Presentation Slides: Pharmaceuticals in Municipal Wastewater (September 24, 2014)

Webinar Q&A 

Q&A with Presenter Mitch Kostich

Publications

• Risks to Aquatic Organisms Posed by Human Pharmaceutical Use (2008)
• Predicting Variability of Aquatic Concentrations of Human Pharmaceuticals (2010)
• Concentrations of Prioritized Pharmaceutical Effluents from 50 Large Wastewater Treatment Plants in the US and Implications for Risk Estimation (2014)