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Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle

Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that m...

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Autores principales: Malmqvist, Erik, Fumagalli, Davide, Munthe, Christian, Larsson, D G Joakim
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10401492/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37547912
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phad012
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author Malmqvist, Erik
Fumagalli, Davide
Munthe, Christian
Larsson, D G Joakim
author_facet Malmqvist, Erik
Fumagalli, Davide
Munthe, Christian
Larsson, D G Joakim
author_sort Malmqvist, Erik
collection PubMed
description Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. Recently, the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) has been advanced as rationale for such distribution. While recognizing some advantages of PPP, we highlight important ethical and practical limitations with applying it in this context: PPP gives ambiguous and arbitrary guidance due to difficulties in identifying the salient polluter. Moreover, when PPP does identify responsible actors, these may be unable to avoid or mitigate their contribution to the pollution, only able to avoid/mitigate it at excessive cost to themselves or others, or excusably ignorant of contributing. These limitations motivate a hybrid framework where PPP, which emphasizes holding those causing large-scale problems accountable, is balanced by the Ability to Pay Principle (APP), which emphasizes efficiently managing such problems. In this framework, improving wastewater treatment and distributing associated financial costs across water consumers or taxpayers stand out as promising responses to pharmaceutical pollution from human use. However, sound policy depends on empirical considerations requiring further study.
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spelling pubmed-104014922023-08-05 Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle Malmqvist, Erik Fumagalli, Davide Munthe, Christian Larsson, D G Joakim Public Health Ethics Original Articles Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. Recently, the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) has been advanced as rationale for such distribution. While recognizing some advantages of PPP, we highlight important ethical and practical limitations with applying it in this context: PPP gives ambiguous and arbitrary guidance due to difficulties in identifying the salient polluter. Moreover, when PPP does identify responsible actors, these may be unable to avoid or mitigate their contribution to the pollution, only able to avoid/mitigate it at excessive cost to themselves or others, or excusably ignorant of contributing. These limitations motivate a hybrid framework where PPP, which emphasizes holding those causing large-scale problems accountable, is balanced by the Ability to Pay Principle (APP), which emphasizes efficiently managing such problems. In this framework, improving wastewater treatment and distributing associated financial costs across water consumers or taxpayers stand out as promising responses to pharmaceutical pollution from human use. However, sound policy depends on empirical considerations requiring further study. Oxford University Press 2023-07-12 /pmc/articles/PMC10401492/ /pubmed/37547912 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phad012 Text en © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Malmqvist, Erik
Fumagalli, Davide
Munthe, Christian
Larsson, D G Joakim
Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title_full Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title_fullStr Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title_full_unstemmed Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title_short Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays Principle
title_sort pharmaceutical pollution from human use and the polluter pays principle
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10401492/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37547912
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phad012
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