MILAN – The area around Milan gains a new negative primacy in terms of the environment: here, in fact, drug pollution is the highest in Europe and, if we stop at Italy, the quantities of medicines that contaminate the soils and waters of that part of Lombardy represent as much as 12 percent of the total of the whole peninsula.
TWO FACTORS – A map published in the magazine reveals it Environment International by a group of researchers directed by Rik Oldenkamp, of the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Nijmegen (Holland). Environmental contamination from antibiotics and anticancer drugs - the two categories taken into consideration - is also quite high in the rest of the Po valley, in the province of Rome and in Campania; on the continent, however, following Milan in the less than honorable "top five" are Paris, London, Krakow and the Ruhr basin. There are essentially two ways that medicines are brought into the environment: their incorrect disposal and sewage systems, since many active ingredients are not degraded by our body and end up in the urine as they are. In defining the map, the Dutch therefore took into account the population density of the various areas, data on the consumption of medicines, but also data on separate waste collection, population density, and the presence and effectiveness of water purification systems. From this operation it was possible to calculate a risk factor for the environment, which is all the higher the greater the contamination, and a risk factor for human health, which instead depends on many other factors, and does not coincide with the first.
WHAT RISKS? – The effect on the population, which comes into contact with environmental drugs mainly through water and food, is determined by its demographic characteristics (children and the elderly are considered more vulnerable), the tendency or not to consume food local, the way in which these are cultivated, and the type of pollutant most widespread in the area, since not all of them have the same toxicity. By putting these parameters together, the researchers have thus established that, although it is the Milanese who live in the most contaminated area of Europe, it is the elderly of Lisbon and the Spanish children who run the greatest risks. What makes the difference is above all the type of pollutant most widespread in the two areas: the antibiotic levofloxacin, whose levels are particularly high in Italy, is in fact less toxic than ciproflo
