ANNOUNCEMENTS
The ongoing situation of Covid-19 has increased the number of pharmaceutical compounds that are being used on a daily basis. Compounds like AZX, TETRA have been used abundantly to treat the initial symptoms of Covid-19. The byproducts of these medicines find their way back into the environment through various means, for example, urine, sweat and sometimes through breath as well. This leads to an increase concentration of such compounds in water, soil and air. The following study aimed at assessing the increase in the use of selected contaminants in the environment and carry out human health risk assessment. For the same a survey questionnaire was circulated among various pharmacist to find the increase in the consumption of these compounds. With the help of literature, POD values were used to calculate Cmax concentrations of the selected compounds and were finally used to create a priority list by assigning ranks to the compounds selected.
From the study it was found that consumption of these medicines had increased approximately 3-5 folds in the last one year. The calculated Cmax keeping HQ = 1 were found to be in the range of 10-4-1 mg/L. The calculated values were compared with OEC of these compounds reported using literature. From the results of risk assessment and ranking system it was clearly concluded that there are certain compounds which are present at concentrations higher than that of the Cmax concentration and need to be given immediate attention.
In today’s world, many documents exist which have regulatory values mentioned for basic water quality parameters like BOD, COD, DO, nitrates, phosphates etc. Water after getting treated from WWTP’s are tested to assess if they meet the regulatory standards before being released. But after the global pandemic there have been an increase in kind of contaminants that have been released into water during day-to-day processes. There are no regulatory values that the government or any organisation have come up with, or no new methods have been developed that will make sure that these contaminants do not enter the water humans use. A research like this will bring this problem out in the open and help pave way for similar researches which can help come up with regulatory values for the same.
