Antibiotics in wastewater - prof Sébastien Sauvé

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Antibiotics in wastewater

10 April 2007

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemScience/Volume/2007/05/Antibiotics_in_wastewater.asp

Antibiotics, which are among the most widely prescribed medicines, can find their way into rivers and lakes because they tend to not to be removed through normal sewage processing. There are growing concerns about the fate of antibiotics in the environment and their possible effects on the aquatic ecosystem.

'It is important to know the amounts of antibiotics released in the aquatic environment to be able to properly evaluate the risks, the effects and the potential impacts of these products,' said Sébastien Sauvé of the University of Montreal, Canada.

Current methods used to measure the amount of antibiotics in wastewater can't cope with the more complex mixtures of compounds found in raw sewage. But now Sauvé and colleagues have developed a method that can pick out antibiotics from samples that contain large amounts of dissolved organic compounds.

Antibiotics flow unhindered through wastewater treatment plants and into our rivers and lakes

The team's method, based on solid-phase extraction followed by mass spectrometry, can detect and identify antibiotics at levels as low as a few nanograms per litre. The researchers tested samples from the Montreal wastewater treatment plant before and after processing. They found that only negligible amounts of many of the antibiotics had been removed during treatment.

Sauvé estimated that up to 830 grams per day of each antibiotic from the treated wastewater are discharged into the St Lawrence River in Montreal. Huw from the Water Research Centre, Marlow, UK said, 'this might be expected to result in a significant environmental impact in the immediate vicinity.'

Nicola Burton

Link to journal article

Determination of six anti-infectives in wastewater using tandem solid-phase extraction and liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometryPedro A. Segura, Araceli García-Ac, André Lajeunesse, Dipankar Ghosh, Christian Gagnon and Sébastien Sauvé, J. Environ. Monit., 2007, 9, 307DOI: 10.1039/b618801j