Ecopharmacology: Deliberated or casual dispersion of pharmaceutical principles, phytosanitary, personal health care and veterinary products in environment needs a multivariate analysis or expert systems for the control, the measure and the remediation

✍ Scribed by M.P. Sammartino; F. Bellanti; M. Castrucci; D. Ruiu; G. Visco; T. Zoccarato

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 791 KB
• Volume: 88
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0026-265X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.microc.2007.11.021

✦ Synopsis

The increasing human and animal use and abuse of drugs as well as of personal health care and gross domestic products, involve disposal and waste problems and, as a consequence, affect the environmental condition. Actually most of the active principles are complex synthesised organic molecules that react, inside human or animal body, by specific biochemical reactions that in no case can reach a 100% yield and produce residues that could be more noxious of the starting compounds. Just reading the indication sheet accompanying any drugs, it is easy to state that no drug can be considered healthy, so, their use constitutes a serious pollution source. The full awareness of this relatively new environmental problem let many researchers to face it from different point of view. Current studies are considering the sources of these substances in the environment, the effects on human health as well as on the flora and fauna species, the recalcitrance and possible degradation methods, analytical techniques able to determine them and their metabolites even at low concentrations and in complex matrices.

Literature on the subject continuously increases and a comparison of all data became more and more difficult both for a single drug and for different ones based on the same or different active principles. This is a typical case in which chemometrics can extract a full information in the easier way, so the design of a European database coupled to suitable expert system software should be strongly suggested.