Search

This report presents the results of a major research project into the total lead content of solvent-based paints for home use available on the market in 15 African countries: Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda and Zambia. It also presents background information on the health impacts of lead paint, especially for children; a review of national policy frameworks that are in place on lead paint, and it provides a strong justification for adopting and enforcing further regulatory controls in these countries.

This article reports on the outcome of an African regional workshop on generating support for phasing out lead in paint. The workshop recommended a lead limit of 90 ppm. In Nigeria, the 90 ppm lead standard has been in place since 2016 and a roadmap on lead paint elimination and management has been adopted.

Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world. This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective. Here, we present a global-scale study of API pollution in 258 of the world’s rivers, representing the environmental influence of 471.4 million people across 137 geographic regions. 

Environmental research is detecting ever more pharmaceutical residues in the aquatic environment as analytical methods become increasingly sensitive. The physicochemical properties of some active substances suggest an accumulation in sediment, suspended matter and biota. Hence, these matrices could be interesting alternative matrices for monitoring of pharmaceutical residues in surface waters. Against this background, modern analytical detection methods for different matrices from water to sediment and suspended matter to biota (fish) were developed and published in 2019 (FKZ 3715 67 413). In the current project sampling concepts were combined with retrospective analyses. In this report, the results of the developed methods from investigations of water, sediment, suspended matter and biota samples from different locations and the German environmental specimen bank are presented in terms of occurrence and distribution.

Persistence is a hazard criterion for chemicals enshrined in chemical regulation worldwide. In this paper, we argue that the higher the persistence of a chemical, the greater the emphasis that it should be given in chemicals assessment and decision making. We provide case studies for three classes of highly persistent chemicals (chlorofluorocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) to exemplify problems unique to highly persistent chemicals, despite their otherwise diverse properties.