Occurrence and Distribution of Pharmaceuticals and Their Transformation Products in Luxembourgish Surface Waters

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals and their transformation products (TPs) are continuously released into the aquatic environment via anthropogenic activity. To expand knowledge on the presence of pharmaceuticals and their known TPs in Luxembourgish rivers, 92 samples collected during routine monitoring events between 2019 and 2020 were investigated using nontarget analysis. Water samples were concentrated using solid-phase extraction and then analyzed using liquid chromatography coupled to a high-resolution mass spectrometer. Suspect screening was performed using several open source computational tools and resources including Shinyscreen (), MetFrag (), PubChemLite (), and MassBank (). A total of 94 pharmaceuticals, 88 confirmed at a level 1 confidence (86 of which could be quantified, two compounds too low to be quantified) and six identified at level 2a, were found to be present in Luxembourg rivers. Pharmaceutical TPs (12) were also found at a level 2a confidence. The pharmaceuticals were present at median concentrations up to 214 ng/L, with caffeine having a median concentration of 1424 ng/L. Antihypertensive drugs (15), psychoactive drugs (15), and antimicrobials (eight) were the most detected groups of pharmaceuticals. A spatiotemporal analysis of the data revealed areas with higher concentrations of the pharmaceuticals, as well as differences in pharmaceutical concentrations between 2019 and 2020. The results of this work will help guide activities for improving water management in the country and set baseline data for continuous monitoring and screening efforts, as well as for further open data and software developments.

The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry

“…A full breakdown is given in Additional file 4 [236]. Of these 19 articles, 12 can be considered "internal", i.e., articles written by authors involved with the NORMAN-SLE, including 5 articles describing SLE datasets [59,118,149,154,174] and 7 others citing SLE lists [24,142,[237][238][239][240][241], while 7 articles are external [242][243][244][245][246][247][248]. Of the 24 lists cited, 6 lists are cited by external authors: S0 SUSDAT, S13 EUCOSMETICS, S14 KEMIPFAS, S25 OECDPFAS, S46 NTPFASREV19 and S75 CyanoMetDB.…”

The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): Facilitating European and Worldwide Collaboration on Suspect Screening in High Resolution Mass Spectrometry

“…4, with list number, code, number of entries (lines in the le, in italics) and the accompanying references. Full details are given in Table S1 [81] and Table S2 [109]; S73 METXBIODB 3148 [110,111]; S14 KEMIPFAS 2602 [112,113]; S21 UATHTARGETS 2466 [114,115] [4,130]; S29 PHYTOTOXINS 1586 [131,132]; S87 CHLORINETPS 1470 [133,134]; S31 WRTMSD 1429 [135,136]; S84 UFZHSFPMT 1310 [137][138][139]; S16 FRENCHLIST 1256 [140]; S37 LITMINEDNEURO 1243 [57,59]; S53 UFZWANATARG 1235 [141]; S82 EAWAGPMT 1162 [142,143]; S23 EIUBASURF 1154 [144]; S39 KEMIWWSUS 1123 [145]; S72 NTUPHTW 1068 [146,147]; S46 PFASNTREV19 1030 [46,47]; S10 SWISSPHARMA 1020 [13,148]; S18 TSCASURF 985 [48]; S61 UJICCSLIB 970 [149,150]; S15 NORMANPRI 967 [151]; S48 CPPDBLISTA 902 [103,105,152]; S51 WRIGCHRMS 892 [153]; S76 LUXPHARMA 816 [154,155] (…”

“…A full breakdown is given in TableS4[236]. Of these 19 articles, 12 can be considered "internal", i.e., articles written by authors involved with the NORMAN-SLE, including 5 articles describing SLE datasets[59, 118,149,154,174] and 7 others citing SLE lists[24,142,[237][238][239][240][241], while 7…”

Unravelling the Occurrence of Trace Contaminants in Surface Waters Using Semi-Quantitative Suspected Non-Target Screening Analyses

“…Hence, some specific substances have been detected potentially reflecting these contributions. For instance, the pharmaceutical carbamazepine, a potential biomarker of wastewater (Singh et al, 2021), and the pesticide fluopyram were detected in the three locations. The confirmed 83 compounds were distributed over the three locations: 61% in Jutland, 76% in Ringsted, and 80% in Faxe (Table S3 in SI).…”

“…The majority of confirmed compounds were well-known trace organic contaminants found in European surface waters (Silva et al, 2011;Singh et al, 2021;Skaarup et al, 2022). Some examples are pharmaceutical residues such as venlafaxine, diclofenac, and carbamazepine; pesticides such as diflufenican, fluopyram, and prosulfocarb, and other compounds such as citroflex 2, sucralose, and triethyl phosphate.…”