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Presence of Pharmaceuticals in Groundwater Down Gradient from Wastewater Lagoons Receiving Partially Treated Wastewater
Citation:
GLASSMEYER, S., C. Kenah, E. T. Furlong, AND D. Kolpin. Presence of Pharmaceuticals in Groundwater Down Gradient from Wastewater Lagoons Receiving Partially Treated Wastewater. Presented at SETAC North American 28th Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, WI, November 11 - 15, 2007.
Impact/Purpose:
Purpose: The purpose of this task is to investigate the relationship between the concentration of the chemical indicators and human health impacts through an epidemiological study with EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory. The epidemiological study will judge the ability of these classes of chemicals to serve as indicators of human fecal material in recreational and/or drinking water source waters, which will help to protect human health. Objective: 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:
Wastewater can contain traces of the pharmaceutical compounds that are used within a given household or community. These chemicals can act as markers of the wastewater, and their presence can help determine potential sources of contamination of water resources. For this study, groundwater samples were collected up and down gradient from an unlined wastewater treatment plant lagoon serving 400 households. All samples were analyzed for 16 pharmaceuticals using liquid chromatography/ mass spectrometry. The study consisted of two phases. In Phase I (August 2005), 13 different boring locations were drilled, and samples were collected at two to three depths within each hole to determine the boundaries of the leachate plume. In addition, the treated effluent, the municipal lagoon, and the community’s drinking water were also sampled. Monitoring wells (MW) were installed adjacent to three of the bore holes, one up gradient, and two down gradient. During Phase II, the three MWs, the lagoon, and the drinking water source were sampled quarterly (January, April, July and October 2006) to examine seasonal trends in chemical concentrations. Thirteen of the 16 target pharmaceutical compounds were detected at least once. Carbamazepine and sulfamethoxazole were the most commonly detected, occurring in every sample collected from the two down gradient MWs, The carbamazepine concentrations in the MW proximate to the lagoon (MW 2) had concentrations which ranged from 0.316 to 0.642 µg/L, median 0.513 µg/L, which were greater than the concentrations we measured in the lagoon samples (0.02 to 0.557 µg/L, median 0.044 µg/L). The concentrations in MW 2 were even greater than the treated wastewater effluent samples collected in 2002 (max = 0.270 µg/L). The samples collected from multiple depths within each boring location exhibited the highest concentrations of pharmaceuticals in the shallower samples (25-45 feet below the surface), with decreasing cocentrations with increasing depths.