Pharmaceutical drugs a worsening Arctic contaminant: researcher

COPENHAGEN — A growing source of contamination has emerged in the Arctic: drugs produced by pharmaceutical manufacturers located far to the south, says a Norwegian researcher.

When you pop a painkiller or an antiobiotic in the Arctic, what you put in your mouth eventually ends up in the region’s water system, said Roland Kallenborn from the University Centre in Svalbard, a speaker at this week’s international conference on Arctic climate change and pollution in Copenhagen.

Kallenborn found that, in some Arctic seawater samples, the presence of ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug often used to treat arthritis, was two to five times higher, and caffeine was up to 80 times higher than in Oslo, more than 2,000 kilometres to the south..

Drug residues surfacing in water near sewage disposal sites is not a new development, he said.

“But it’s underestimated in the Arctic,” he told Nunatsiaq News. “And it’s time to do something about it.”

Sewage systems — in even southern cities with sophisticated sewage systems — don’t filter out tiny micro-pollutants like drug residues, he said.

However, those urban sewage systems do allow more time for drugs to break down before the waste water is released.

But in the Arctic, sewage systems are less effective. This means drugs, including caffeine, flow into the sea or leach out into the land after little treatment, and they don’t break down as quickly due to the cold.

For his study, Kallenborn looked at sewage and seawater from three places in Norway: a treatment plant serving about 100,000 people in Oslo to the south, another for 65,000 people in Tromsø and a third for the 2,000 residents of Longyearbyen on the Svalbard Islands in Norway’s Arctic.

Among his findings:

• some samples taken very close to a sewer outlet near a psychiatric hospital in Oslo showed measurable amounts of anti-epileptic drugs and anti-depressants;

• each litre of water discharged from the Tromsø treatment centre contained up to 100 micrograms of caffeine, and also contained measurable traces of ibuprofen; and

• in Longyearbyen, the presence of ibuprofen and caffeine in the seawater near the discharge point was many times higher than in Oslo; traces of antibiotics and medications used to treat high bloodpressure and cholestrol were also found in the Arctic water samples.

Pills are made to be ultra-resistant because they have to travel down the digestive tract, Kallenborn said.

Cold Arctic temperatures also appear to keep drugs from breaking down into harmless substances before they go into the environment.

So, once drugs are released into the Arctic environment, they stay around longer, where they can be consumed by fish, birds and marine mammals — and people.

That’s a health problem, because repeated doses of antibiotics can lead to people to developing a resistance to antibiotics, Kallenborn said.

Some drugs, like those used to control high blood pressure and cholesterol, also affect animals in low doses, he said.

As for caffeine, there’s almost no information about what kind of problems caffeine, a poison at very high concentrations, can cause in nature.

Caffeine is found in coffee and cola as well as in some medicines.

Researchers believe that about 80 per cent of caffeine comes from households, offices and restaurants, with medicines accounting for the rest.

The presence of drug residues in the Arctic will only grow, Kallenborn said, as communities grow and diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure increase.

Climate change will also open up new areas of the region to more people, shipping and airline traffic, he said.

“And where there are people, there are pharmaceuticals.”