Review on Pollution and Transfer-transformation Behaviors of Pharmaceuticals in Aquatic Environment
Pharmaceuticals have been playing an important role in human's health and stockbreeding for decades. However, incompletely absorbed pharmaceuticals will find their way into wastewater in original structure or metabolites, and ineffective operations of wastewater treatment plant make their widespread appearance in water environment possible. Pharmaceuticals become the kind of persistent pollutants in aquatic environment since they have been widely and continually used in daily life although their half-lives are short. In recent years, pharmaceuticals were identified in different environmental media including surface water, ground water, drinking water, sludge, soil and aquatic organisms. It has been increasingly concerned of their effect on ecological environment and human's health in the world. Current study trends in terms of source, occurrence and transfer-transformation behaviors of pharmaceuticals in aquatic environment were reviewed, which will provide an important basis for developing relative research in China as well as establishing ecological risk assessment of pharmaceutical in aquatic environment.