Trace Pharmaceuticals in Wastewater

This week's cover story in C&E News addresses an aspect of drug therapy use which is neglected by the public but is a concern to the chemical science community. That is, thanks to our increase sensitivity in analytical intruments, we have been able to detect trace amounts of pharamceuticals in our waste water, such as synthetic estrogen, ibueprofen, and drugs used in chemotherapy.

It is important to consider, though, that these drugs appear in the parts per trillion concentration range (an equivalent of a picoliter of the drug per liter of water). So it isn't a direct threat to humans or our metabolisms, per se.

However, our metabolisms are not as sensitive to such trace amounts as organisms living in aqueous environments. The first half of the artilce discusses the feminization of certain fish species in waters where trace therapeutic estrogen has been discovered in the water table.

I admit that I have not read the journal articles listed in the C&NE article, but I certainly do hope at least one had analyzed the contents of the liver and other potential filtration organs of the fish for amounts of the estrogen ingested.

But why would i study the liver? The liver is where the majority of drugs are decomposed in the body. To me, it makes logical sense that pharmacology would occur similarly in the liver of the fish and of the human. A such, we could determine relative estrogen concentrations of the liver, and determine the amount of drug retention the fish are capable of possessing. That is, does the drug accumulate overtime in the fish or is it simply the presence of the minute concentrations in their environment which induces feminization?

Of course, humans have little to fear in their drinking water. The filtration techniques for waste water is different then water that will be consumed. The latter has the design to remove nearly all contaminents whereas the former is concerned with only making the water clear and have little to no odor.

Though this issue is not new, every year we develop more efficient technologies which may be implemented to help address the unintentional introduction of pharaceuticals into the environment. This is a worthy goal for engineers and chemists interested in lessoning the environmental impact human industires have on local ecologies.

Though this issue is nothing new, I hope the issue can be addressed efficiently and promptly. I believe one of the goals of humanity ought to be to lessen our impact on local ecologies and the global environment from our industries.