Pharmaceuticals in the environment.

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals gather more than 1000 biologically active molecules used in human and veterinary medicine around the world. The increase in drugs’ consumption and the development of improved analytical environmental techniques have resulted in identifying these emerging pollutants in all aquatic compartments, ranging from surface water and groundwater resources to the marine environment. Numerous investigations have indicated that a hundred of pharmaceuticals and their metabolites are frequently detected in the aquatic environment, at international level, at concentrations ranging from nanogram per liter to microgram per liter. The concentrations even surpass the microgram/liter level in sewage treatment effluents. Once there, they may be responsible for chronic poisoning of aquatic species due to their still effective biological activity. The European authorities have considered this hazard for years, leading to investigations only for new pharmaceuticals entering the market and when the predicted exposure concentration is greater than 100 ng/l. So, despite the work provided on some of these substances, many of progress remain to be made because our knowledge is still limited on the occurrence, distribution pathways, and ecotoxicological potential of most of pharmaceuticals in the environment. The special issue addresses studies targeting the occurrence, fate, and transport of pharmaceuticals and their degradation products in the environment, including chemical analysis and methods development and the characterization of their effects on aquatic organisms. A particular attention is paid in this special issue of ESPR to marine ecosystems. Contamination of marine ecosystems by pharmaceuticals begins to be known, despite the number of journal papers devoted to describing this contamination remains relatively small at the moment. If few studies have been conducted in the marine environment, the reasons are mainly due to the very low concentration of pharmaceuticals controlled by dilution and diffusion processes and to the complex hydrodynamics of the marine environment. Arpin-Pont et al. propose an examination of papers focused on analyzing and describing the contamination of coastal and marine waters, by studying a total of 111 papers concerning 196 pharmaceuticals and 37 personal care products reported frommore than 50 marine sites. An interesting selection of the analyzed data was conducted considering their analytical quality, which allowed providing levels of the most frequently found molecules, leading to different pharmaceutical classes: antibiotics, non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), central nervous system drugs, analgesics, analeptics, and illicit drugs, as well as personal care products, in bothmarine water and sediment. Point source pollution such as sewage treatment plant (STP) outfalls or estuaries impact the surrounding area, with concentrations most often found to decrease with increasing distance from the pollution source. Salicylic acid, acetaminophen, or venlafaxine accumulate in marine bivalves, suggesting that a particular interest may be payed to undesirable effects of these substances in marine organisms. A study of one of these point source sites is provided by Martinez-Bueno et al., in the vicinity of a STP outfall. A persistent pharmaceutical, the antiepileptic carbamazepine (CBZ), and its main human metabolites have been analyzed during a year Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues