Abstrakt
Pharmaceuticals represent one of the major contaminants of the environment. In the European Union over 3000 pharmacologically active substances are used in human and veterinary medicine, such as analgesics, antibiotics, antidiabetics, contraceptives, antidepressants, lipid regulators, beta blockers etc.
The amounts of used drugs in large countries are in the hundreds of tons per year. Parent compounds and their metabolites penetrate into environment due to imperfect cleaning of municipal wastewaters in water treatment plants.
The cleaning technology is currently not completely effective for low-level pollution and significant amounts of drugs and their metabolites are present in the effluent. The consumption of drugs dramatically increases year by year.
Moreover the new developed drugs are bioactive in very small doses. This is favorable for medical treatment; on the other hand even the small amounts of these substances can affect the ecosystem.
The penetrating substances influence both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and in the long-term exposure can be dangerous for all organisms. The concentrations of drugs in environment are much lower than therapeutic and acute toxicity data are not relevant.
Unfortunately, the chronic toxicity potential subtle effects are only marginally known. The uptake of drug contaminants by plants causes food chain contamination.
Well known is high death rate among species of vulture in India caused by analgesic-anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac which has been used to treat of sick cows. For this reason, it is very important to study interactions between contaminants and plants.
Plants can extract contaminants from soil and stored them into cells. It can be used for phytoremediation technology, as an attractive method for environment cleaning.
This technology requires study not only the plant uptake ability, but also the enzymatic transformations in plants because more environmentally dangerous substances can be formed as is the case with biological waste water treatment.