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Estimating aquatic hazards posed by prescription pharmaceutical residues from municipal wastewater
Citation:
KOSTICH, M. AND J. M. LAZORCHAK. Estimating aquatic hazards posed by prescription pharmaceutical residues from municipal wastewater. Presented at SETAC 2008 Ohio Valley Chapter, Bloomington, IN, October 03, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Determine extent of environmental and human exposures to EDCs, characterize sources and factors influencing these exposures, develop and evaluate risk management strategies to reduce exposures. In order to develop effective risk management strategies, it is important to understand the extent of exposures to endocrine disrupting compounds and factors influencing source-to-exposure-to-dose relationships.
Description:
Risks posed by pharmaceuticals in the environment are hard to estimate due to limited monitoring capacity and difficulty interpreting monitoring results. In order to partially address these issues, we suggest a method for prioritizing pharmaceuticals for monitoring, and a framework for converting concentration measurements into hazard estimates. We used publicly available marketing and wastewater statistics to estimate national annual consumption of about 400 prescription active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and resulting maximum average concentrations of APIs in raw wastewater. For each API, we used known pharmacological parameters as LOECs for calculating hazard ratios for humans, microbes and other organisms. Similar hazard ratios were calculated for mixtures of pharmaceuticals sharing modes of action. In order to estimate potential local variability of these hazards, our analyses was extended to the state and three-digit zip code levels for a subset of pharmaceuticals for which local distribution data is available. This approach has allowed us to prioritize analytes for monitoring based on potential hazard, estimate maximum likely aquatic hazards posed by APIs that have never been monitored, and provide a reasonable framework for interpreting monitoring results in the absence of extensive ecotoxicological data.