Environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals at a seasonal holiday destination in the largest freshwater shallow lake in Central Europe

Abstract

The presence of pharmacologically active compounds (PhACs) in surface waters poses an environmental risk of chronic exposure to nontarget organisms, which is a well-established and serious concern worldwide. Our aim was to determine the temporal changes in ecological risk quotient (RQ) based on the concentrations of 42 PhACs from six sampling sites on seven sampling dates in the water of a freshwater lake in Central Europe preferentially visited by tourists. Our hypothesis was that the environmental risk increases during the summer holiday season due to the influence of tourists. Different experimental toxicological threshold concentrations and seasonal measured environmental concentrations of 16 PhACs were applied to ecological risk assessment. RQs of 4 dominant PhACs (diclofenac, estrone [E1], estradiol [E2], and caffeine) indicated high ecological risk (RQ > 1) for freshwater ecosystems. Additionally, our results confirmed the assumptions that the high tourist season had a significant impact on the calculated RQ; however, these results are mainly due to the concentration and temporal change of particular PhACs, including diclofenac (5.3-419.4 ng/L), E1 (0.1-5.5 ng/L), and E2 (0.1-19.6 ng/L). The seasonal dependent highest RQs changed as follows: 9.

Presence and risk assessment of pharmaceutically active compounds in neotropical small basins, Brazil

“…Then, we detected differences in types of emergent contaminants and also in scale of RQ among small basins. Results are similar to those recorded in other studies in Brazil (Mizukawa et al 2018;Peteffi et al 2019;Montagner et al 2019) and other countries (Garrido, et al 2016;Pereira et al 2017;Zhang et al 2018;Wee et al 2019;Molnar et al 2020).…”

Antibiotic and analgesic residues in the environment – Occurrence and ecological risk study from the Sunyani municipality, Ghana

“…Lately, pharmaceuticals have become micro-contaminants in soil and water as the rate of their introduction in the environment surpasses degradation [10 ] . Analgesics and antibiotics are among the most widely detected pollutants in the environment and are, hence, considered pseudo-persistent contaminants [11 ] .…”

Effects of pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs) on fish body and scale shape in natural waters

“…If PNEC can be determined knowing of hazardous concentration for 5% of species investigated (HC5 based on ecotoxicological results of at least five species), then AF = 5. When data are available for each trophic level, the lowest concentration was selected to determine PNEC since environmental risk assessment is based on the most sensitive elements of the ecosystem ( Molnar, Maasz & Pirger, 2020 ). PNECs with raw ecotoxicological data and AFs are presented in Table S2 .…”