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Groundwater contamination by pharmaceuticals
Aquifer contamination by medical drugs / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Groundwater contamination by pharmaceuticals, which belong to the category of contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) or emerging organic pollutants (EOP), has been receiving increasing attention in the fields of environmental engineering, hydrology and hydrogeochemistry since the last decades of the twentieth century.[1]
Pharmaceuticals are suspected to provoke long-term effects in aquatic ecosystems even at low concentration ranges (trace concentrations) because of their bioactive and chemically stable nature, which leads to recalcitrant behaviours in the aqueous compartments, a feature that is typically associated with the difficulty in degrading these compounds to innocuous molecules, similarly with the behaviour exhibited by persistent organic pollutants.[1][2] Furthermore, continuous release of medical products in the water cycle poses concerns about bioaccumulation and biomagnification phenomena.[3] As the vulnerability of groundwater systems is increasingly recognized even from the regulating authority (the European Medicines Agency, EMA), environmental risk assessment (ERA) procedures, which is required for pharmaceuticals appliance for marketing authorization and preventive actions urged to preserve these environments.[4][5]
In the last decades of the twentieth century, scientific research efforts have been fostered towards deeper understanding of the interactions of groundwater transport and attenuation mechanisms with the chemical nature of polluting agents.[6] Amongst the multiple mechanisms governing solutes mobility in groundwater, biotransformation and biodegradation play a crucial role in determining the evolution of the system (as identified by developing concentration fields) in the presence of organic compounds, such as pharmaceuticals.[7] Other processes that might impact on pharmaceuticals fate in groundwater include classical advective-dispersive mass transfer, as well as geochemical reactions, such as adsorption onto soils and dissolution / precipitation.[7]
One major goal in the field of environmental protection and risk mitigation is the development of mathematical formulations yielding reliable predictions of the fate of pharmaceuticals in aquifer systems, eventually followed by an appropriate quantification of predictive uncertainty and estimation of the risks associated with this kind of contamination.[6]
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