Conclusions and Future Perspectives
During the course of this book, we have witnessed how wastewater represents an important agronomic resource especially in areas of the world affected by drought or where availability is usually limited. However, this practice raises many fears not only in
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Introduction Presence of Drugs in Soils and Their Remediation Presence, Uptake, and Metabolism of Drugs in Crops Toxicity in the Environment and Humans Methods for the Analysis of PhACs in Soil-Crops Systems
Abstract During the course of this book, we have witnessed how wastewater represents an important agronomic resource especially in areas of the world affected by drought or where availability is usually limited. However, this practice raises many fears not only in the environmental field but especially in the case of food safety. In fact, wastewater represents the main source of diffusion of pharmaceutical residues (including degradation products and metabolites) in the aquatic and terrestrial environment. For assessing the occurrence of drugs and related substances, sensitive analytical methods have recently become available. Keywords Agrosystems, Ecotoxicity, Human health, Metabolism, Vermiremediation
S. Pérez (*), D. Barceló, N. Montemurro, and P. Eichhorn ENFOCHEM, Department of Environmental Chemistry, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research IDAEA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] S. Chiron UMR HydroSciences 5569, HSM, Montpellier University, Montpellier, France Sandra Pérez Solsona, Nicola Montemurro, Serge Chiron, and Damià Barceló (eds.), Interaction and Fate of Pharmaceuticals in Soil-Crop Systems: The Impact of Reclaimed Wastewater, Hdb Env Chem, DOI 10.1007/698_2020_655, © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
S. Pérez et al.
1 Introduction Pharmaceuticals constitute a structurally diverse class of mostly synthetic organic compounds that have been designed and optimized for their efficient and selective interaction with a specific macromolecular target whose modulation has been demonstrated to result in the desired pharmacological response in the treated organism. In case of drugs for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of medical conditions in humans, the ultimate goal of all research and development efforts in industrial settings is to deliver medicines with proven efficacy and safety for a given indication. Therefore, drugs receiving marketing authorization from the regulatory agencies have undergone extensive testing in clinical trials involving large number of patients to fully satisfy the two aforementioned essential requirements. As desirable as it may appear from an environmental perspective, pharmaceutical compounds are designed in the first place to improve the health of human beings according to the treatment plan with a given route of administration. In many cases this means that high metabolic stability in the human body is a desirable feature; only when the rate of biotransformation is low enough can systemic exposure at an acceptable dose be achieved. If drug metabolism is extensively studied at the drug discovery stage, including the elucidation of metabolic pathways and the identification of the enzymes responsible for each of the reactions, then these investigations aim at gaining a broad understanding of the clearance mechanisms a
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