The presence of pharmaceutical products (PPs) in the environment is no longer a new issue and is numerously documented. Whether the occurrence, fate and behavior are now relatively well characterized and unquestionable, the current main question concerns the potential risk of pharmaceutical products for the environment as well as for human.
For human health, there is a tendency to consider the risk as negligible, taking into account drinking water as principal way of exposure and the PPs concentrations (one million to one billion fold below the therapeutic dose). On the contrary, the environmental risk is real with some examples described in the literature such as fish feminization, birds damages, genotoxic effect on wildlife, …
However, both for human and environmental risk assessment, there are more uncertainties than certainties, in particular due to one hand the limited number of studies (in particular for human health) and on the other hand due to the lack of some data required for a robust risk calculation. Numerous parameters are not considered and end-points used in different studies are questionable.
This presentation aims to illustrate (1) the current knowledges concerning the ecological and human health risk of PPs in the environment and (2) the needs and trends in research for a better understanding of the risk of these molecules.