The fate and effects of human pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment.

Abstract

There is relatively little known about the fate of human pharmaceuticals once they are released into the aquatic environment and what adverse impacts these compounds have on exposed aquatic organisms. Both of these factors are essential in defining the potential risk pharmaceuticals pose in the aquatic environment. For this project up to 14 human therapeutic agents were selected as representative compounds to assess both their fate and effects within model aquatic systems. Considering sediments often serve as a repository for aquatic contaminants, the interaction of the selected pharmaceuticals with sediment was assessed. The sorption of the selected pharmaceuticals was found to be highly variable. Furthermore, the solution pH and ionic strength, due to Ca2+, were found to exert a large degree of influence on the extent of sorption observed. These solution parameters, among others, may therefore make it difficult to predict the fate of pharmaceuticals, in terms of their association with sediments, using standardised assessment methods alone. There is an extensive pool of knowledge on pharmaceuticals, in terms of their pharmacological profile, so their distribution within the human body (using the volume of distribution or VD) was compared with their distribution within a sediment / water system (using the partition coefficient or Kd). The correlation between the VD and Kd indicated this relationship provided a reasonable basis for estimating the distribution of drugs within the test sediment / water systems. This finding suggests that further exploration of the use of pharmacological data in understanding the potential fate of pharmaceuticals in aquatic systems is warranted. The extent of the pharmaceuticals respective desorption values was also found to be highly variable within a standard test system. Further analysis on the desorption of carbamazepine, an anti-epileptic drug, was undertaken using an isotopic dilution technique. Observations from the isotopic dilution study indicated that both contact time with sediment and the quality of organic carbon could play an important role in the potential for sediments to irreversibly sorb carbamazepine present in aquatic systems. The desorption hysteresis observed for the other pharmaceuticals also indicates considerable effort is still required to address the issue of whether sediments can be a means of reducing exposure of pharmaceuticals to aquatic organisms (a “sink”) or a means of increasing exposure to sediment-dependent organisms (a “source”). The necessity for further work on investigating the role that sorption with sediments may play in the fate and effects of human pharmaceuticals was highlighted by a series of ecotoxicological assays in both sediment and solution-only systems. Sediment-dwelling freshwater midges, Chironomus tepperi, were exposed to carbamazepine in both short- and long-term assays. Wet weight was found to be significantly reduced during short-term assays, while the development of C. tepperi larvae was found to be significantly inhibited when exposed to spiked sediment, over a longer exposure period. For these assays, the aqueous phase may have been a more important route of exposure of carbamazepine for the midges. This study has indicated that sediments are likely to play an important role in the fate of pharmaceuticals and, subsequently, their effects. However, considerably more effort is required to assess the role sediments have and how this knowledge can be linked with current regulatory ecological risk assessments.