Discharge of pharmaceutical products (PPs) through a conventional biological sewage treatment plant: MECs vs PECs?

Predicting concentrations of cytostatic drugs in sewage effluents and surface waters of Catalonia (NE Spain)

“…Prednisone is used to treat hormone-sensitive tumors, such as leukemia, and also for many other indications including asthma, multiple sclerosis or tuberculosis. Table 1 displays the different per capita consumption rates of relevant cytostatics in Europe in mg inhab À 1 d À 1 (Besse et al, 2012;Booker et al, 2014;Coetsier et al, 2009;Johnson et al, 2008a;Kümmerer and Al-Ahmad, 2010;Martín et al, 2014;Ortiz de García et al, 2013;Rowney et al, 2009). The most consumed cytostatics were mycophenolic acid, capecitabine and hydroxycarbamide, with consumptions ranging from 221 to 704 m g inhab À 1 d À 1 .…”

“…In 2006, the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) developed a model to estimate PECs of pharmaceuticals in water and proposed that a PEC value 410 ng L À 1 for an individual drug should be a trigger threshold for further environmental risk assessment (EMEA, 2006). This model or equivalent has been extensively used with or without refinements to estimate PECs of pharmaceuticals (Carballa et al, 2008;Coetsier et al, 2009;Escher et al, 2011;Kugathas et al, 2012;Le Corre et al, 2012;Oosterhuis et al, 2013) or specifically cytostatics in surface or wastewaters (Besse et al, 2012;Booker et al, 2014;Gómez-Canela et al, 2014;Johnson et al, 2008aJohnson et al, , 2013Kümmerer and Al-Ahmad, 2010;Martín et al, 2014;Rowney et al, 2009). As stated by Zhang et al (2013), PECs only provide a rough insight of the overall contamination at national or regional scale, not accounting for local specificities and contamination hot spots (Zhang et al, 2013), therefore their accuracy depends strongly on the precision of the model used (Carballa et al, 2008).…”

“…As stated by Zhang et al (2013), PECs only provide a rough insight of the overall contamination at national or regional scale, not accounting for local specificities and contamination hot spots (Zhang et al, 2013), therefore their accuracy depends strongly on the precision of the model used (Carballa et al, 2008). The reliability of the PEC is a key point for the assessment of environmental risks for aquatic organisms and in this context the ratio PEC/MEC (measured environmental concentrations) is a good approach to estimate the relevance of PEC values with an acceptable consistency for the ratio 0.2-4 range (Coetsier et al, 2009).…”

Tamoxifen persistently disrupts the humoral adaptive immune response of gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata L.)

“…The pharmacological targets of Tmx include ER, the multi-drug resistance gene product, permeability-glycoprotein (Callaghan and Higgins, 1995) and 7-transmembrane G protein-coupled receptor (GPER) (Revankar et al, 2005;Vivacqua et al, 2006). Tmx has been detected in wastewater effluent and surface waters in concentrations ranging from 27 to 212 ng/L in UK (Hilton and Thomas, 2003;Thomas and Hilton, 2004) since its elimination in sewage treatment plants is often incomplete (Coetsier et al, 2009), reaching the aquatic environment and impacting on exposed organisms (Coetsier et al, 2009). Tmx has been recommended for use as a reference compound in fish testing in terms of understanding the potential impact of selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) in aquatic life (Ankley et al, 2002).…”

Occurrence, Ecotoxicology, and Treatment of Anticancer Agents as Water Contaminants

“…Liu et al [75] systematically measured ten hormone antagonists in hospital and WWTP wastewater samples. The concentration of tamoxifen in hospital effluent, WWTP effluent, and surface water [76] Ecotoxicology of these endocrine disrupting and highly lipophilic compounds has been extensively studied, especially considering the possibility of bioaccumulation. Williams et al found that the lowest observed effect concentration of tamoxifen was 5.6 µg/L on the changes of histology, reproduction, and growth of fathead minnows [77].…”