Pharmaceuticals have recently become a group of emerging environmental contaminants that have raised great concern. They can enter the environment either as parent compounds or metabolites, conjugates or both. Pharmaceuticals have been found as contaminants in surface waters, wastewaters and in soil at concentration levels of up to a few μg/L. However, for some classes, such as steroid hormones the concentrations are much lower, e. i. at ng/L levels. Steroids and antibiotics are two groups of special concern due to serious impact to the environment and wildlife. The presence of antibiotics in ecosystem can induce a development of bacterial resistance. Steroid compounds were described to influence lifecycles of fish. Therefore they might be expected to interfere with sexual functions of other organisms as well. Highly sensitive and selective analytical methods are needed to analyze pharmaceuticals present at trace amount in very complex environmental samples. Moreover, extensive sample clean-up and pre-concentration is the key issue of method development. HPLC with selective detectors, such as fluorescence and mass spectrometry have become methods of choice in environmental analysis. Fluoroquionolone antibiotics were studied in detail using both types of detection. It was revealed that the efficiency of wastewater treatment plant was not sufficient to remove 100% of all antibiotics from hospital wastewaters and that some amount of antibiotics was thus released into the environment. These findings are in agreement with the data published in scientific literature.
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UHPLC-MS/MS chromatogram of determination of five fluoroquionolone antibiotics using SRM mode and SIL-IS for reliable quantitation. |
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Applicability of UHPLC-MS/MS method for the measurement of wastewater samples in different seasons. Insufficient removal of antibiotics by wastewater treatment plant was demonstrated, especially for ofloxacin. |