Issues, challenges, directives, and limitations concerning the improvement of environmental risk assessment of pharmaceutically active compounds

Nowadays, when tons of different chemicals including pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs) are known to be released into the environment, applying adequate risk assessment relating to the protection of the ecosystem is very important. A broad body of scientific papers expresses a growing demand for improvement of the method(s) for ecological/environmental risk assessment (ERA). Although certain issues about ERA often emerge in the community, most of them cannot be considered as real problems and its methodology was developed keeping several limitations in mind. Nevertheless, the current approaches can be improved in order to better serve the intended purposes. For example, there is a lack of an integrated, manageable ecotoxicological database. It is not uncommon for basic, but extremely important, influencing factors such as time of exposure, interactions between different compounds, and characteristics of different habitats to be ignored. Discussing under the basic regulatory framework used in the EU, this correspondence paper deals with these and other examples to present the current features of ERA, identify gaps in process and application, and propose possible improvements/directives.

Automated summary

The need for improvement in ecological/environmental risk assessment methods has been highlighted, despite the existing approaches being developed with certain limitations in mind. Areas for improvement include the lack of an integrated ecotoxicological database and the overlooking of basic but important influencing factors.