Trace Levels Of Pharmaceuticals Research Articles

A review of extraction methods for the analysis of pharmaceuticals in environmental waters

Pharmaceuticals play a vital role in the prosperity of human and veterinarian health by diagnosing, treating, or preventing diseases. Produced in large quantities for various applications, pharmaceuticals primarily enter the environment through wastewater systems. Historically, the ability to detect pharmaceuticals in environmental waters has been limited. However, growing technological advancements are changing pharmaceutical detection capabilities and our understanding of their occurrence in environmental waters. The analysis of pharmaceuticals in the environment began with simple gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and evolved to using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry as the dominant method. Many of these methods require sample extraction, with solid phase extraction (SPE) being the most popular. Additionally, miniaturized and on-line extraction procedures have also attracted a lot of attention. Nevertheless, approaches involving large volume injections without the need for sample enrichment have made significant strides in recent years. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of extraction methods for environmental water samples containing trace levels of pharmaceuticals and how current applications will mold how they are analyzed in the future.

Influence of sewage and pharmaceuticals on soil microbial function

Although sewage effluent application to land is a common approach to recycle water and provide nutrients to plants, bioactive pharmaceuticals contained in sewage may change soil quality by affecting soil microbial communities. Establishing causal effects, however, is difficult, because trace levels of pharmaceuticals are confounded with other effluent constituents. Therefore, two originally similar soil microbial communities, one irrigated in situ with sewage effluent for 12 years and another nonirrigated, were exposed to high levels of acetaminophen, aspirin, carbamazepine, chlorpromazine, and tetracycline. The objectives of the current study were to determine the influence of high levels of pharmaceuticals on several soil microbial properties, the effect that prolonged effluent irrigation with ambient levels of pharmaceuticals had on soil microbial function, and how this effect would change in response to pharmaceutical exposure. Several pharmaceuticals, at high exposure levels, imposed stress on the soil microbial community as judged by increased CO(2) respiration, decreased biomass carbon, and altered substrate utilization affinities. Prolonged effluent irrigation, which altered the genetic fingerprint of the microbial community, also mitigated the response that exposure to pharmaceuticals had on the microbial community and enabled degradation of the antimicrobial salicylic acid after aspirin exposure. In conclusion, prolonged irrigation with sewage effluent containing pharmaceuticals at ambient levels influenced the microbial community so that they were able to better cope with sudden exposure to high levels of pharmaceuticals.