Pharmaceutical Pollution of the eco-system and Its Detrimental Effects on Public Health

Pharmaceutical pollution of the eco-system is a life-threatening problem cuasing great concerns for health researchers. Pharmaceutical pollution of drinking waters and its adverse side-effects on public health has been recently reported in the developed countries. The aim of this study was to investigate the different aspects of bio-environmental side effects of pharmaceutical pollutions mentioned in online resources and websites. For this review study, the main key words of "Pharmaceutical" and "pollution" were searched through; Google scholar search engine, Springer and Elsevier sites. By altering the research strategy, the most up-to-date references, articles, books and related subjects focusing on different cities of our country, Iran, were retrieved. The findings of this search showed that large amounts of chemical sewage is released into the environment by pharmaceutical factories. The other sources of contamination are as folows: expired and unused drugs, and excreted pharmaceutical metabolites formed during drug metabolism in humans and animals. Unfortunately many researches confirmed that the conventional water treatment processes are not effective for reasonable purification of drinking waters. Additionally, due to the long half-life of some drugs especially antibiotics, the risks of drug resistance, mutagenic effects on microorganisms and other cells, and their environmental accumulation are high and may lead to hazardous consequences. So more studies in this field are warranted.