Pharmaceutical drugs as environmental emerging pollutants

Pharmaceutical drugs have been considered in recent years as one of the groups belonging to emerging contaminants regarding environmental pollution. Their presence in aqueous matrices is mainly related to emissions in their production, direct disposal in environment and human and/or animal excretion. These pollutants can be found in rivers and other aqueous matrices, in very low concentrations, below the ppm level. As, normally, they occur in trace concentrations, their identification and quantification were complex tasks since they require very expensive and not so available analytical methods. Additionally, the actual European Legislation is still scarce for this called “emergent contaminants”. Nowadays, there is a strong interest in the development of inexpensive and acute determination methods for these compounds, to overcome the huge lack of information about the potential harmful effects in the living beings and in the environment. In this study, it will be presented the development of a complete analytical methodology and its validation, for the detection and quantification of a set of eight different pharmaceutical drugs. The studied pharmaceutical drugs, azithromycin, sulfamethoxazole, caffeine, paracetamol, acetylsalicylic acid, ketoprofen, diclofenac, and carbamazepine, are representative drugs of several different therapeutic classes: two antibiotics, one central nervous system stimulant, two analgesics, two non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and one anticonvulsant, respectively. Experimental results will include solid phase extraction (SPE) as an extraction/concentration technique followed by detection and quantification using high performance liquid chromatography with diode array detector (HPLC-DAD). The complete separation of all the studied compounds requires the use of two different columns and the optimization of two mobile phase compositions. For compounds with low pKa values a Nucleosil 100-5 C18 column is used with a solvent composed of acetonitrile:water:trifuoracetic acid. For compounds ...