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FATE OF PHARMACEUTICALS: EFFECTS OF CHLORINATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERSISTENCE
Citation:
GLASSMEYER, S., E. L. FURLONG, D. L. KOLPIN, J. D. CAHILL, S. D. ZAUGG, S. L. WERNER, M. T. MEYER, AND D. D. KRYAK. FATE OF PHARMACEUTICALS: EFFECTS OF CHLORINATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERSISTENCE. Presented at 57th Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, Orlando, FL, March 12 - 17, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The initial objective is to evaluate a large suite of chemical compounds for their correlation the incidence of illness due to human contamination of water sources. The ultimate objective of this task is to develop and evaluate a method that will determine the two to five strongest chemical candidates that are associated with human waste streams, and determine their ability to monitor water quality and predict human health effects in source and finished waters as a surrogate for traditional methods of human fecal contamination.
Description:
The presence of pharmaceuticals in environmental waters has become an area of concern around the world. To maximize the impact of occurrence studies, pre-screening can help determine which compounds are likely to survive waste water treatment, as well as what by-products are formed. To investigate the effects of chlorination on pharmaceuticals, a group of fourteen pharmaceuticals and common human pharmaceutical metabolites were analyzed using liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. Six of the target compounds were unaffected by chlorination and eight were transformed due to chlorination. Only two of the pharmaceuticals - acetaminophen, gemfibrozil - were found to become chlorinated during the experiments. These simple screening tests can help determine which pharmaceuticals or their by-products should be targeted in future occurrence studies. To further examine the fate of pharmaceuticals in the environment, they and other chemicals found in human wastewater, were evaluated as tracers of human fecal pollution. At ten locations, water samples were collected upstream, and at two points downstream from a wastewater treatment plant. A treated effluent sample was also collected at each location. Seventeen of the 110 compounds were classified as either a prescription or non-prescription pharmaceutical. Of these, nine were found in at least 50% of the samples and thirteen were found in at least 10% of the samples. The concentrations of the majority of the chemical compounds present in the samples generally followed an expected trend: 1) they were non-existent or at only trace levels in the upstream samples, 2) had their maximum values in the wastewater effluent samples, and 3) declined in the two downstream samples. This work indicates that these chemical analytes do have utility as tracers of human wastewater discharge.