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Browsing by Author "Vesterinen, Sami"

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  • Vesterinen, Sami (2022)
    There is continuously more pharmaceuticals ending up in the environment due to the amount of consumption. Wastewatertreatment plants are the largest point source for the pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment, because most of the pharmaceuticals are meant for humans. Human pharmaceuticals can end up in the ecosystem as they are or as metabolites. Both pharmaceuticals and their metabolites can cause a similar physiological response in the organisms living in the aquatic ecosystem, than in their originally intended target organism, humans. This is the reason why contamination of pharmaceuticals in the environment can be very harmful for the aquatic organisms. Two breast cancer medication were selected for this experiment, which are tamoxifen and letrozole. Both of these medication are very effective in controlling hormonal functions of humans and other organisms. Third pharmaceutical selected for this experiment was diclofenac, which is commonly used NSAID. Active sampling can be very expensive and time consuming, because many samples have to be collected from the same site and they have to be collected at many occasions, so that the time-weighed average of the concentration studied can be found. Passive samplers are devices or sorbents that are able to absorb substances into them. They can be calibrated in the laboratory with known concentrations of studied chemicals and then can be places in a study location in the nature to calculate time-weighed average concentration of the studied chemical in that location. In this study only diclofenac was found in the fieldstudy and only with SDB-RPS-sampler. SDP-RPS samplers absorb mostly chemicals with lower octanol-water partition coefficient and silicone rubber samplers are more suitable for chemicals with higher octanol-water partition coefficient, this was also shown in this study.