Ecotoxicological Risk of Human Pharmaceuticals in Brandenburg Surface Waters?

According to the definition of the German medicine law (AMG 2001), pharmaceuticals are, amongst other things, intended to heal, to mitigate or prevent in their application in the human or animal body, diseases, suffering, body damage or pathological burdens. The undisputed positive purpose of pharmaceuticals and the question of cost budgeting has, in the recent past, limited the room to critically consider, from an environmental perspective, the possible unwanted side effects arising from medicament consumption in Germany. In the German Federal state in 1999 alone the five most important and available pain and rheumatism drugs had approximately 39 tonnes of active substances which, in pharmaceuticals for humans, contained 2.1 tonnes of active antibiotic substances (Abbas and Kratz 2000; BLAC 2001). These biologically high-activity materials are partly converted after intake in the human body and separated afterwards into original and converted forms (BLAC 2001). Within the sewage waters, these residues arrive at the sewage treatment plant, at which point they are often undesirably, incompletely mitigated or held back in surface waters (BLAC 2001).