Attitudes and Practice Regarding Disposal for Unwanted Medications among Young Adults and Elderly People in China from an Ecopharmacovigilance Perspective

Xiaotan Yu, Xianmin Hu, Shulan Li, Mengya Zhang and Jun Wang
Additional contact information
Xiaotan Yu: New Medicine Innovation and Development Institute, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065, China
Xianmin Hu: New Medicine Innovation and Development Institute, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065, China
Shulan Li: New Medicine Innovation and Development Institute, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065, China
Mengya Zhang: New Medicine Innovation and Development Institute, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065, China
Jun Wang: New Medicine Innovation and Development Institute, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065, China

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 8, 1-16

Abstract: Due to the expensive cost and uncertain effectiveness of environmental management options in eliminating pharmaceutical residues, recently, decreasing the emission of pharmaceutical pollutants from a drug administration perspective has been considered a hot area of research. As a kind of drug administration for the environment, ecopharmacovigilance (EPV) emphasizes the source control of pharmaceutical pollutants. Disposal of unwanted medicines has been considered as the easiest target for source control of pharmaceutical contamination. Here, we focused on public attitudes and practice regarding disposal of unwanted medicines from the EPV perspective among 365 Chinese university young adults and 206 elderly retirement home residents. The results showed that the majority of respondents had positive attitudes, but exhibited inadequate awareness and poor practice. In addition, the young-adult respondents were found to pay more attention to the environmental problems posed by pharmaceutical residues, and be more supportive of the EPV intervention predominantly performed by pharmaceutical industries and pharmacists. Therefore, it is urgent to establish the standard medicine disposal protocols and educate the general public on the best way for medication disposal under the principle of EPV in China, and efforts on environmentally-preferred drug disposal under EPV should target for the specific demographics.

Keywords: ecopharmacovigilance; disposal of unwanted medicines; pharmaceutical; environment; young adults; elder people (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1463/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1463/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:8:p:1463-:d:225716

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().