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Web End = Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess (2015) 29:20732085 DOI 10.1007/s00477-015-1026-4
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Web End = Species-related risk assessment of antibiotics using the probability distribution of long-term toxicity data as weighting function:a case study
Conrad Marx Viktoria Mhlbauer
Peter Krebs Volker Kuehn
Published online: 13 January 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract Urban areas are among the main sources which release antibiotics into the environment. The fate of antibiotics during their passage through the human body, the sewer system and the waste water treatment processes can be estimated and used for ecological risk assessment. The present approach deals with the possibility of addressing the ecological impact on individual trophic levels using a probability function to attenuate the classical PNEC approach. The species sensitivity distribution (SSD) is based on available long-term toxicity data and was tted using the Hill-equation. The species-related toxicity threshold was merged with the slope characteristics gathered from SSD to express the risk probability of each species level. The results for algae and crustaceans show that azithromycin, clarithromycin and ciprooxacin contribute the highest risk portions to the risk index (RI). The determined RI for sh was found to be below the threshold value of 1 and thus no risk is expected for this species.
Keywords Antibiotics Sensitivity distribution
Risk assessment Prescription data
1 Introduction
Chemical substances which are released into the aquatic environment carry the potential to cause harm to a variety of organisms and compartments (Cao et al. 2009; Guo et al. 2013). The impairment of a few established organisms in natural ecosystems can severely disrupt the sensitive food web which requires a proper characterisation and control of the according substances. In this context, the European Commission offers a widely accepted guideline (Technical Guidance Document on Risk AssessmentTGD) on how to assess the environmental risk of chemicals in e.g. water bodies (EU 2003). This guideline is based on the identication of Predicted No-Effect Concentration (PNEC), which is put into relation with a Predicted or Measured Environmental Concentration (PEC or MEC) to dene the resulting risk (Fahd et...