Municipal wastewaters are major sources of pollution for the aquatic biota. The purpose of this study was to determine the levels of some pharmaceutical products and the immunotoxic potential of a municipal wastewater aeration lagoon for the treatment of the domestic wastewaters of a small town with wastewater inputs from a 400-bed hospital complex. Endemic mussels were collected, caged and pla...

Wastewater from a pharmaceutical formulation facility (TevaKS, Israel) was treated with a biological activated-sludge system followed by ozonation. The goal was to reduce the concentrations of the drugs carbamazepine (CBZ) and venlafaxine (VLX) before discharging the wastewater to the municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). Both drugs were detected at extremely high concentrations in TevaK...

During 8 sampling campaigns carried out over a period of two years, 72 samples, including influent and effluent wastewater, and sludge samples from three conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), were analyzed to assess the occurrence and fate of 43 pharmaceutical compounds. The selected pharmaceuticals belong to different therapeutic classes, i.e. non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,...

The present study deals with the assessment of toxicity of distillery effluent on soil microorganisms and its quality improvement through bioremediation using Pseudomonas spp. Under lab scale experiment, different dilutions of distillery effluent i.e. 25%, 50%, 75% were used to examine effects on physico-chemical parameters of effluent and on soil microflora e.g. algae, bacteria, fungi and acti...

The impact of effluent wastewaters from four different hospitals: a university (1456 beds), a general (350 beds), a pediatric (110 beds) and a maternity hospital (96 beds), which are conveyed to the same wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), was evaluated in the receiving urban wastewaters. The occurrence of 78 pharmaceuticals belonging to several therapeutic classes was assessed in hospital efflu...

Ozonation to achieve removal of pharmaceuticals from wastewater effluents, with pH values in the upper and lower regions of the typical range for Swedish wastewater, was investigated. The main aim was to study the effects of varying pH values (6.0 and 8.0), and if small additions of H2O2 prior to ozone treatment could improve the removal and lower the reaction time. The effluents studied differ...

Pharmaceuticals are chemicals that are used because of their biological activity. They are often excreted unchanged and can reach the environment. Throughout developed countries, the pharmaceutical concentrations in the aquatic environment are in the same range (μg L−1 and below); however, it is not clear whether this holds for less-developed countries too. The health risks of active pharmaceut...

Proteases are a group of enzymes, found in all living organisms and are essential for the cell growth and differentiation. The proteases have wide applications in pharmaceutical, leather, laundry, food and waste processing industries. Their catalytic function is to hydrolyze peptide bonds of proteins and break them down into polypeptides or free amino acids. The present study was aimed at isola...