Panacea in the water?
Today's programme is chock full of environmental chemistry, including a few sessions on pharmaceuticals in the environment. In the last few decades chemistry has given us more and better drugs, and we have not been shy about taking them. One graph of pharmaceutical consumption in France from 1970 to the present was hair-raisingly steep. All those drugs that aren't broken down by our bodies are, well, let's be scientific here, excreted and enter the waste-treatment stream. Some end up in rivers and lakes.
So it is good that chemists are busy inventing new tools to understand the scope of the problem and what it's implications might be—beyond trout blissed out on Prozac or crustaceans with the caffeine shakes.
Outside the environmental session room, a poster by Mei-Fang Chou and colleagues from Tri Service General Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, gives me pause. They've managed to tweak the non-speedy alertness enhancer and mood brightener modafinil (sold as Provigil) so that it also is an anti-inflamatory pain reliever. Holey moley—what a blockbuster that could be. A cure for pain, sleepiness and unhappiness in one drug. Look out fish.
Comments
Dear Nature,
I was amazed by 'Look out fish'! I eat fish everyday!
It is true, in a real nature. It happens everywhere. No one can stop it. But, as a chemist we can reduce this doom.
Now, nano-delivery tools are emergingly progressive. The use of nano-delivery toos such as; nanoemulsion, nanovesicle, nanoliosomes, etc. may assist clinician to reduce the unwanted drug concentration as the nano-tools will have enhanced and improvised performance. Better targetted diseased tissue and good delivery will help to reduce unnecessary high dosage of drug(s). Thus, reduced unprocessed drugs will be secreted to the environment.
At least, the fish will consume less, less drug.
Posted by: Mohd. Rezuwan Shah Zakaria | September 1, 2006 11:21 AM