Wastewater Analysis and Drugs

Introduction

Analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community is a developing field, involving scientists working in different research areas, including analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology.

This page(link is external), put together by EMCDDA, presents the findings from studies since 2011. Data from all studies may be explored through an interactive tool, and a detailed an analayis of the findings of the most recent study in 2020 is presented.

A PDF version of a selection of the information on this page is available in EMCDDA's Publications database(link is external). See their wastewater analysis and drugs hub page(link is external) for more information and resources on this topic.