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EMERGING CONTAMINANTS: AN OVERVIEW OF ON-GOING RESEARCH
Citation:
ROSAL, C. G. EMERGING CONTAMINANTS: AN OVERVIEW OF ON-GOING RESEARCH. Presented at 17th Annual Quality Assurance Conference, Dallas, TX, October 15 - 19, 2007.
Impact/Purpose:
Clean and Safe Water – by providing water quality research and methods development at multiple scales, utilizing landscape ecology and associated techniques
Description:
This presentation covers an overview of research on emerging contaminants on-going at
U.S. EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas. Due to the
improvements and sophistication of recent analytical instruments, increasing numbers of
chemicals are being detected in environmental media. These chemicals are often referred
to as emerging contaminants. In reality, each of these contaminants has probably been
in the environment since the time it was manufactured and used by society. They
escaped detection because they were not on target list of pollutants to monitor or the
instruments at the time were not sensitive enough to detect them (at concentrations of
parts per billion and below). Among the emerging contaminants on which our laboratory
focuses are pharmaceuticals (human and veterinary use) and personal care products
(PPCPs) because of their widespread use. Presence of these materials in the environment
poses potential exposure for a wide spectrum of organisms (especially aquatic life) as
well as for humans (especially from drinking water supplies). Exposure assessment is
the key to risk assessment and management.
The following research projects are currently on-going: 1) Development of approaches
to identify-categorize which emerging contaminants (or classes) present potential
exposure risks for the environment or human health (e.g., macrolide antibiotics in
biosolids, phototoxicity of sunscreen agents by computational chemistry), and 2)
Development and application of analytical tools to determine exposure in various
environmental compartments (water, sediments, fish tissue, aquatic plants) to human and
veterinary-use pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Preliminary results will be
presented for each of the studies.