Screening of Human Antibiotic Substances and Determination of Weekly Mass Flows in Five Sewage Treatment Plants in Sweden

Abstract

Twelve antibiotic substances for human use, including trimethoprim and representatives of the fluoroquinolone (FQ), sulfonamide (SA), penicillin (PE), cephalosporin (CE), nitroimidazole (NI), tetracycline (TC), and macrolide (MA) groups, were subjected to a screening study at five Swedish sewage treatment plants (STPs) during one week in 2002 and one week in 2003. The analytes were extracted from raw sewage water, final effluent, and sludge by solid-phase extraction (SPE) or liquid-solid extraction (as appropriate) and then identified and quantified by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry. The mostfrequently detected antibiotics in the matrices considered in this study were norfloxacin, ofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole, and doxycycline. The other analytes were only detected in a few samples. Analysis of the weekly mass flows through each STP showed that FQs were partly eliminated from the water during sewage water treatment and the highest amounts of these substances were found in sludge. Sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim were mainly found in raw sewage water and final effluent, but these substances had balancing mass flows, indicating that they too can withstand sewage water treatment. The mass flow patterns for doxycycline were more complex, with high amounts occurring in sludge in some cases, suggesting thatthe behavior of this analyte may be more strongly influenced by the treatment process and other variables at individual STPs. The environmental load (the sum of the amounts in the final effluent and sludge) normalized to the number of inhabitants in the catchment area of each investigated STP compared with theoretical predictions based on consumption data (in parentheses) showed good correlations: norfloxacin, 0.8 (0.9); ofloxacin, 0.3 (0.2); ciprofloxacin, 1.3 (3.5); sulfamethoxazole, 0.2 (0.4); trimethoprim, 1.1 (1.0); and doxycycline, 0.7 (0.4) mg per person per week. The results show that reasonably accurate predictions of environmental load of these antibiotics can be time-effectively derived from consumption data without additional measurements.

Removal of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes from domestic sewage by constructed wetlands: Optimization of wetland substrates and hydraulic loading

“…5), suggesting adsorption is an important aqueous removal process for the ARGs and antibiotics at least for ETM-H 2 O and OFX. In fact, previous studies have reported that the predominant removal mechanism for OFX was adsorption onto sludge rather than biodegradation in wastewater treatment plants (Lindberg et al, 2005;Li and Zhang, 2010;Jia et al, 2012). As to ETM-H 2 O, adsorption onto the substrates seems limited when compared to its total mass removals, suggesting biodegradation played a more important role.…”

An overview of analytical methodologies for the determination of antibiotics in environmental waters

“…At pH bellow 7.0, ERY is immediately converted into its main degradation product ERY-H 2 O and ERY is not detected in its original form but as a degradation product (ERY-H 2 O) with an apparent loss of one molecule of water. Thus, ERY-H 2 O is very often quantified in many studies [59], assuming that ERY is totally converted into ERY-H 2 O in SPE procedures. Additionally, since the oral administration of ERY has to pass through strongly acidic conditions in the stomach, the degraded product ERY-H 2 O, does not exhibit the original antibiotic properties [30].…”

“…Other studies did not refer using IS. In some multiresidue studies ENRO [10,24,59] or lomefloxacin [18] were used as ISs. These ISs were suitable because of similarity with the analyzed compounds, but there was a risk about their possible occurrence in the environment.…”

“…However using isotope labelled IS was not referred in any study. Some compounds from the class of TCs were also utilized as IS in multiresidue studies: demeclocycline [10,59] or meclocycline [3].…”

Rapid detection of multiple class pharmaceuticals in both municipal wastewater and sludge with ultra high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

“…Meanwhile, ultrasonic solvent extraction (USE) and solid phase extraction (SPE), because of their simple, fast and inexpensive operational merits, have been adopted extensively as pretreatment techniques to extract and enrich micropollutants from various matrices (Lindberg et al, 2005;Pan et al, 2011a). The analysis of pharmaceuticals in the WWTPs represents a difficult task due to the high complexity of the wastewater and sludge matrices.…”