Pharmaceuticals in the environment

摘要

When Rebecca Klaper searched for signs of pharmaceuticals in Lake Michigan, she got a surprise. The most common drag she found was one she hadn't even considered looking for-metformin, a diabetes drug. "It wasn't even on our radar," says Klaper, a freshwater scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the United States. 'We only found it because the Environmental Protection Agency just happened to add it to the detection assay we used." Perhaps even more surprising was how far the drug had spread from the point it entered the lake via treated sewage. "Lake Michigan is huge, so we expected a big dilution effect, but we were still finding drugs, including metformin, three miles from the sewage treatment plants," she says.