By Janet Raloff
Over the past decade, European chemists have been documenting widespread pharmaceutical contamination of their lakes, streams, and groundwater. In San Francisco this week, U.S. and Canadian scientists offered preliminary confirmation that traces of drugs, excreted by people and livestock, similarly pollute American waters.
Water pollution by drugs “is a newly emerging issue,” observes Christian G. Daughton, a symposium co-organizer and chief of environmental chemistry at the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas. By offering a U.S. venue for the meeting—and participation by many European leaders in this field (SN: