Perpustakaan Digital ITB

In this work, the presence of 20 pharmaceuticals in wastewater from Colombia is investigated. Several widely consumed compounds have been detected in wastewater samples from different origins and geographical areas in Colombia. The studied pharmaceuticals included antibiotics, analgesics and anti-inflammatories, cholesterol lowering statin drugs, lipid regulators, and anti-depressants. The investigated samples were urban wastewater collected during one whole week before (influent) and after treatment (effluent) in the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) of Bogotá and Medellin. Raw wastewater from the Hospital of Tumaco and from the city of Florencia were also collected. Analyses performed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) revealed that most of the target analytes were present in all the wastewater samples. The highest concentrations (up to 50 ?g/L) corresponded to acetaminophen, but several antibiotics, such as azithromycin, ciprofloxacin and norfloxacin, and antihypertensive drugs, such as losartan and valsartan, were commonly present in influent wastewater (IWW) at levels above 1 ?g/L. Moreover, the treatment applied in WWTPs seemed to not efficiently remove the compounds under study, because most pharmaceuticals were also present in effluent wastewater (EWW) at concentrations close to those of the IWW. Special emphasis was made in this work on the quality of data reported, performing a detailed study of quality control (QC) samples.