Pharmaceutical pollutants in water seem to benefit at least one species — effects that could be missed by standard risk assessments.
08 August 2014
Studies of the impact of pharmaceuticals on fish such as the English perch may have overlooked positive effects, researchers claim.
Fish that have been exposed to a common anti-anxiety drug are more active and have better chances of survival than unexposed fish, researchers report in Environmental Research Letters1. The results suggest that standard methods for assessing the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals in waterways might miss some of the drugs' effects because they focus exclusively on harms, according to the authors.
In the study, researchers led by Jonatan Klaminder at Umeå University in Sweden exposed Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis) to oxazepam, one of a widely used class of anti-anxiety drugs called benzodiazepines.
Standard ecotoxicology experiments use unstressed, healthy fish that have been bred in labs. Control groups are designed to have 100% survival rates so that decreases in survival in the test group are easy to detect by comparison. But it is difficult to detect any increase in survival rates when the control group already has nearly complete survival.
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