Temporal and spatial variation in pharmaceutical concentrations in an urban river system

TLDR: Data comparisons indicate that pharmaceutical exposures in river systems are highly variable regionally, in part due to variability in prescribing practices, hydrology, wastewater management, and urbanisation and that select annual median pharmaceutical concentrations observed in this study were higher than those previously observed in the European Union and Asia thus far.

About: This article is published in Water Research.The article was published on 2018-06-15 and is currently open access. It has received 127 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Environmental exposure & European union.

Figures

Figure 1. Map of 11 sampling sites within the sampling network. River flows recorded from a gauge in each river (orange triangle) from each sampling day (m3/s) are pictured top left. WWTPs that serve the city (3) are represented by the red rectangles. Sites F1-F5 are along the smaller River Foss, while sites O1-O6 are along the larger River Ouse.

Table 1. Summary results (ng/L) for the River Foss from the January to December 2016 monitoring campaign. The annual median, concentration range and frequency of detection for each sampling site are reported.

Table 1. Summary results (ng/L) for the River Foss from the January to December 2016 monitoring campaign. The annual median, concentration range and frequency of detection for each sampling site are reported.

Figure 4. Total pharmaceutical concentration (summed) of all detected analytes at each sampling site from each month during 2016 in the River Foss. Sampling locations (blue circles) in relation to Environment Agency Flow gauges (orange triangles) are depicted along the river.

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