Pharmaceutical Pollution in the Environment and Health Hazards

Today Pharmaceutical products are very important and essential in modern life and are used to treat human and animal diseases.Furthermore, presence of pharmaceutical products in the environment is one of the most important and concerned problems 1. The main resources of Pharmaceutical pollution in the environment are including raw and treated effluent from the pharmaceutical factories, hospital waste, excretion by livestock treated with antibiotics, runoff from agricultural fields, and municipal wastewater treatment plants 2. Pharmaceutical products with a long half-life are environmentally sustainable 3 and remain at the wastewater treatment stages and will enter to the environment 4. Recently, pharmaceutical products have been found to be abundant in sewage treatment plants, surface water, ground water, and in particular drinking water 2, 5. Antibiotics as a large group of Pharmaceutical or drugs, are widely used in the treatment of infections, in which accounts for about 15% of total drug use in this group 6. This material disrupts the sewage treatment processand the microbial ecology of surface water 4. Due to the presence of antibiotics in the treatment systems, the activity of sewage bacteria isinhibited and can seriously affect the organic matter decomposition 7. The presence of an antibiotics group is considered to be toxic tonitrifying bacteria in the wastewater treatment process. In the study on the sewage treatment system that received various antibiotics in human wastewater, there was also a decrease in the number of bacteria along with a change in the microbial population. Therefore, the effects of antibacterial agents should be given special attention 8. Antimicrobial resistance of isolated bacteria from urbanand hospital wastewater showed that the rate of drug resistance in hospital wastewater is higher than urban wastewater. Increasing the concentration and diversity of antibiotics in hospitals, in comparison with urban sewage, leads to an increase in the resistant bacteria transmission as well as multiplier resistance