Occurrence of Cytostatics in Different Water Compartments

The chapter deals with the occurrence of a selection of anticancer drugs in 5 different water environments: hospital wastewater, wastewater treatment plant influ- 6 ents and effluents, surface water, sea water, and drinking water. Unfortunately, no 7 data are available for groundwater up to now. The chapter presents and discusses 8 measured environmental concentrations of anticancer drugs collected in 56 peer- 9 reviewed papers referring to investigations carried out in 18 countries all over the 10 world. It focuses on the variability of observed concentrations in the different 11 environments, and it highlights the importance of planning efficient sampling 12 strategies in order to obtain representative water samples. 13 The highest concentrations in hospital effluents were found for platinum-based 14 compounds and 5-fluorouracil (> 10 15 5 ng L1), in the influent for ciprofloxacin (> 10 16 3 ng L1), in the effluent for platinum-based compounds, ifosfamide and bicalutamide (> 10 17 3 ng L1), and in surface water for cyclophosphamide, tamoxifen, ciprofloxacin, and bicalutamide (> 10 18 2 ng L1). In addition, a comparison is provided between measured and predicted concentrations of some anticancer drugs 19 and a brief discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches is 20 reported.