A new study has found pharmaceutical pollutants at levels that pose a threat to environmental and human health in more than one-fourth of the river sites globally.

John Wilkinson, of the University of York in England, and researchers from the Global Monitoring of Pharmaceuticals Project noted that carbamazepine and metformin were the two most common contaminants and were identified in over half of the 1,000 river sites tested in more than 100 countries. Lifestyle compounds, such as caffeine, nicotine, and acetaminophen, were detected in rivers on all continents. At 270 river sites, concentrations of pharmaceutical contaminants reached levels where they would be predicted to start impacting the growth of fish and invertebrates, like mollusks and insects. The report is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences… (Medpage Today)