Immunochemical Determination of Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products as Emerging Pollutants

Abstract

A review on immunochemical methods for the analysis of pharmaceuticals is presented. A broad range of pharmaceutical categories and personal care products may reach the aquatic environment after excretion through industrial, domestic, and hospital wastewater. With few exceptions pharmaceuticals for human medicine are not high-production chemicals and the expected environmental concentrations should be low. However, the use of some of these chemicals in veterinary medicine increases the probability that the concentration values in the aquatic environment might reach higher levels. On the other hand certain drugs with limited use are of concern because of their high pharmacological potency, which creates a risk even at trace levels. Attending to these considerations and to the potential human risks, this review focuses on antibiotics, hormones, analgesics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and cytostatic agents. Although these procedures have only been applied to the analysis of environmental samples on a few occasions, immunochemical methods for several of these substances exist and some of them are commercially available due to their use in clinical laboratories and forensic medicine.