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Volume 7 Supplement 2

13th Scientific Symposium of the Austrian Pharmacological Society (APHAR). Joint Meeting with the Austrian Society of Toxicology (ASTOX) and the Hungarian Society for Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology (MFT)

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Hospital waste water: health risk for human and environment by cytostatic drug emissions? Part II: Biological monitoring (genotoxicity assays) and risk assessment

BMC Pharmacology volume 7, Article number: A70 (2007) Cite this article

Biological monitoring

Assays: (a) Bacterial mutagenicity (TA98, TA100), (b) single cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE; endpoint: DNA migration) with primary rat hepatocytes. Waste water samples: effluent of (a) the total hospital (TH), (b) the oncological ward (OW), collected before dilution in the Vienna sewer system.

Results

All samples negative in bacterial assays, acute bacteriocidal/bacteriostatic effects of highest water volumes tested. SCGE assays: increase but no significant differences between DNA migration caused by TH and OW samples. The genotoxic activities of the waters could be reduced significantly (25–50%) by waste water treatment.

Risk assessment

according to EU Guidelines aimed at elucidating priorities and urgencies for risk management. Integrating chemical and biological monitoring data, genotoxic profile and (sparse) data on aquatic toxicity revealed that the endangerment of humans, aquatic and terrestrial environment by cytostatic drugs released via hospital waste water could be preliminary classified as small. A reduction of the avoidable environmental load – in line with EU document 2000/60/EC – could be achieved by advanced waste water treatment at the source as applied within the framework of this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cancer Research, Clinics of Internal Medicine I, Medical University of Vienna, Austria

    Franziska Ferk, Susanne N Mahnik, Robert M Mader, Petra Krenn, Siegfried Knasmüller & Wilfried Bursch

  2. Umweltbundesamt, Vienna, Austria

    Maria Uhl

  3. BOKU University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Maria Fuerhacker, Susanne N Mahnik, Katharina Lenz, Norbert Weissenbacher, Stephan Hann & Gunda Koellensperger

Authors
  1. Franziska Ferk
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  2. Maria Uhl
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  3. Maria Fuerhacker
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  4. Susanne N Mahnik
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  5. Katharina Lenz
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  6. Norbert Weissenbacher
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  7. Robert M Mader
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  8. Petra Krenn
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  9. Stephan Hann
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  10. Gunda Koellensperger
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  11. Siegfried Knasmüller
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  12. Wilfried Bursch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wilfried Bursch.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Ferk, F., Uhl, M., Fuerhacker, M. et al. Hospital waste water: health risk for human and environment by cytostatic drug emissions? Part II: Biological monitoring (genotoxicity assays) and risk assessment. BMC Pharmacol 7 (Suppl 2), A70 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2210-7-S2-A70

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2210-7-S2-A70

Keywords

BMC Pharmacology

ISSN: 1471-2210