Antibiotics in the Hong Kong metropolitan area: Ubiquitous distribution and fate in Victoria Harbour

Occurrence and distribution of antibiotics in the Beibu Gulf, China: Impacts of river discharge and aquaculture activities

“…In general, the dilution factors from point source discharges to receiving surface waters such as rivers and streams are on the order of tens to hundreds (Minh et al, 2009). However, the average concentrations of the Qin River, Jingu River and Dafeng River were only twice those in the gulf; even the concentration in the Maoling River was lower than that of the Maowei Sea (Fig.…”

Occurrence and risk assessment of antibiotics in river water in Hong Kong

“…Some of the antibiotics, such as sulfonamides which are hydrolytically stable, hard to degrade in water and easy to be transported, are found in larger amounts in groundwater and surface water (Boxall et al, 2002;Stoob et al, 2007). Antibiotics, together with their degradation and metabolic products have been detected in many environmental compartments, including surface water (Tang et al, 2015), river water (Tamtam et al, 2008;Jiang et al, 2011;Li et al, 2015), seawater (Minh et al, 2009;Zou et al, 2011), municipal sewage (Li et al, 2009;Lindberg et al, 2010), sludge (Göbel et al, 2005;Lindberg et al, 2010), soil (Christian et al, 2003), sediment (Pei et al, 2006), groundwater (Standley et al, 2008;Fick et al, 2009;Teijon et al, 2010;López-Serna et al, 2013), and even drinking water (Yiruhan et al, 2010).…”

“…Nevertheless, previous surveys of antibiotics have mainly focused on the Pearl River region in Guangzhou or on individual areas of Hong Kong (Xu et al, 2007a(Xu et al, , 2007bMinh et al, 2009;Yang et al, 2011). Data regarding the contamination and distribution of antibiotics in the river water of the entire region of Hong Kong are limited.…”

Antibiotics in the offshore waters of the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea in China: Occurrence, distribution and ecological risks

“…Some recent studies showed that notable amounts of antibiotic residues were transported to coastal areas via riverine inputs (Jia et al, 2011;Zhang et al, 2012b;Zou et al, 2011) and STP effluents (Gulkowska et al, 2007;Minh et al, 2009) except for some residues that were used in mariculture (Jia et al, 2011). Although steep gradients from rivers (or STPs) to the sea were observed for most of the studied antibiotics due to dilution with seawater, many occurred widely in the coastal area, with some of the antibiotics causing high ecological risks to some aquatic organisms.…”

“…Among the ten detected antibiotics, the three predominant antibiotics also presented the highest concentrations. The mean and maximum concentrations of the three predominant antibiotics were from 0.69 to 1.4 ng L À1 and from 6.7 , respectively, which were obviously lower than those in the coastal water, such as the Bohai Bay (Zou et al, 2011), Laizhou Bay (Zhang et al, 2012b), Liaodong Bay (Jia et al, 2011), Victor Harbor (Minh et al, 2009), Hong Kong coasts (Gulkowska et al, 2007) and Belgian coastal harbors (Wille et al, 2010) (Supplementary Table S6). Compared with the three predominant antibiotics, the other antibiotics showed much lower concentrations.…”