Fármacos como poluentes emergentes em meios aquosos no Nordeste de Portugal
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abstract
Pharmaceutical drugs have been considered as one of the priority pollutants belonging to emerging contaminants regarding environmental pollution. Their presence in aqueous matrices is related with emissions in their production, direct disposal in environment and human and/or animal excretion. These micropollutants can be found in rivers and other aqueous matrices, in concentrations below the ppm level. Nowadays, there is a strong interest in developing inexpensive and optimized determination methods for these compounds. This presentation presents the development of a complete analytical methodology and its validation, for the detection and quantification of a set of eight different pharmaceutical drugs belonging to different therapeutic classes: azithromycin, sulfamethoxazole, caffeine, paracetamol, acetylsalicylic acid, ketoprofen, diclofenac, and carbamazepine. The selected method was SPE/HPLC-DAD because it is a more economically attractive method and easier to implement. Experimental results will include solid phase extraction (SPE) as an extraction/concentration technique followed by detection and quantification using high performance liquid chromatography with a diode array detector (HPLC-DAD). The complete separation of all the eight studied compounds requires the use of two different chromatographic 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 acetonitrile:water:trifuoracetic acid solvent composition. For compounds with higher pKa values, a SiliaChrom XT C18 column is used with a methanol:water:diethylamine solvent composition. SPE recoveries, calibration curves, limits of detection and quantification will be presented. Several samples were collected from three different rivers from the Bragança region and the developed methodology was implemented to measure drugs concentration.
