It is always interesting to read things that happen in other countries that we know will never happen in the United States because of our unwillingness to be unfriendly to corporations.  The first was Germany’s request to its citizens to cut back on meat.  And then the United Kingdom followed with their own health program that encouraged taking public transportation to your surgery.  And, now there is this….

The European Union requires pharmaceutical companies to analyze the environmental risks of their drugs.  This became a growing concern after the vast amount of data in which various drugs were showing up in water supplies.  With this information, doctors can take environmental factors into consideration prior to prescribing the medication.

Most countries have followed the minimum requirements set forth by the law.  However, some countries have moved many steps further.  For example, Sweden.  

They have managed to create a database that rates pharmaceutical substances in terms of their toxicity, persistence, and bioaccumulation potential based on data given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. It is part of Stockholm’s larger effort to reduce levels of the most environmentally hazardous medicines in wastewater effluent and in surface water by 2011.

The hope is that doctors will pick the greener of two similar options.  The database currently has 1,100 substances and gets 5 million hits per month.  Because of its success, it is expected that the entire European Union will institute the use of the database.

The United States, however, does not assess or classify drugs based on their environmental impact.  What is also interesting is that if an American drug company wants to sell its product in Europe, and invariably they all do, they must comply with providing the impact report.  The transition to bring this live in this country would be cost effective and easy…. half of the work is already done.

However, given that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest lobbying industries in D.C., we would guess a database like this would never be implemented in the states.  It would require guidelines being met that they would argue would impact the bottom line.  Politicians would side with the drug makers for the simple reason that they would want to get reelected and their campaign financed.  This country has shown time and time again that we support corporations over people and there is doubt that this would be an exception.

* reference material came from an article published in Environmental Health News

** photo by kasrak, via Flickr