Pharmaceuticals and personal care products: Research needs for the next decade

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) include numerous classes of chemicals with unique physiochemical properties and biological activities. Over the past decade research on the occurrence, fate, effects, risk assessment, and management of PPCPs in the environment has peaked. It is important to appreciate the utility of traditional approaches for examining contaminant hazard and risk while understanding relevant limitations and important research needs to advance environmental risk assessment (ERA) and management efforts for PPCPs. Spurred initially by the critical reviews of Halling‐Sorensen et al. [1] (755 citations as of 6 July 2009) and Daughton and Ternes [2] (778 citations as of 6 July 2009), this special issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry includes a timely collection of manuscripts examining the environmental chemistry, toxicology, risk assessment, and management of PPCPs. A vast number of PPCPs have now been detected in surface waters across the world. For human PPCPs, effluent‐dominated ecosystems appear to represent worst‐case scenarios for waterborne exposure and potential adverse effects [3]. For veterinary medicines, inputs from manure application to soils and the use of aquaculture are probably the most important exposure routes [4]. The nature of exposure to human PPCPs and veterinary medicines are also very different. Human PPCPs are typically released continuously from wastewater treatment plants and are therefore considered to be pseudo‐persistent [5] with increased effective exposure duration in effluent‐dominated systems [6], whereas veterinary drugs are either transported to surface waters in pulses during rainfall (livestock treatments) or are applied directly to aquatic systems in a single dose. The risk assessments of human use substances and veterinary medicines should therefore be addressed very differently. While most monitoring studies have focused on wastewater treatment systems and surface waters, researchers are beginning to recognize that other environmental compartments are also important. Hence, recent studies have explored the occurrence of PPCPs in biosolids, soils, sediments, biota, drinking water, and even food crops [7]. For example, in this issue Ramirez et al. present findings from a National Pilot Study of PPCPs in Fish Tissue from the United States, which expanded previous observations of fish bioaccumulation in an urban effluent‐dominated river [8].