Determination of acidic pharmaceuticals in municipal wastewater by using solid-phase extraction followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals and their transformation products have been more frequently detected in aquatic environments over recent years. The presence of pharmaceuticals in environment systems for the rst time was observed in 1970s in United States, when clo bric acid, salicylic acid and ca eine were detected in sewage e uent and in ground water (clo bric acid) [9]. Yet, it was only in the second half of the 1990s that scienti c interest has grown signi cantly as a consequence of huge developments in analytical techniques. Moreover, the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment has raised awareness of the risk that pharmaceuticals may pose on aquatic organisms due to their biological activity and possible long-term exposure [23]. Drugs, after oral administration are excreted from the body either as metabolites or as the parent compounds and through the domestic sewage system they reach municipal wastewater treatment plant. Recent studies showed, that conventional wastewater treatment procedures consisting of physical, chemical and biological processes are insu cient to eliminate these micro contaminants completely, thus e uents have been recognized as a major source of pharmaceuticals entering the aquatic environment [3, 10, 11, 26]. Residues of pharmaceuticals are being detected mainly in Western Europe and USA water environment at the level of ppt to ppb in sewage e uents [25, 26], in surface water [2, 30] and even in drinking water sources [1, 8]. So far, there has been just few publications on their occurrence in Polish water bodies. In 2005, the presence of 23 pharmaceuticals from di erent therapeutic classes in raw wastewater from Zabrze up to 27 g/L was revealed [7]. In the same year, scientists from Gdansk University of Technology determined the presence of non-steroidal anti-in ammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in surface water up to ~0.5 g/L [5]. Kasprzyk-Hordern et al. [13, 14] published results of determination of numerous