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Effects of some human pharmaceuticals on freshwater organisms Volume 5, issue 4, Juillet-Août 2006

Authors
Laboratoire d’écotoxicologie, Institut de recherche pour l’ingénierie de l’agriculture et de l’environnement (Cemagref), 3, bis quai Chauveau, CP 220, 69336 Lyon cedex 09, France, Institut F.-A. Forel, Université de Genève, 10, route de Suisse, CH-1290 Versoix

This study measured the lethal and sublethal effects on two invertebrates (Brachionus calyciflorus, a rotifer, and Ceriodaphnia dubia, cladocera) and the zebrafish (Danio rerio) of several human pharmaceuticals in seven therapeutic classes— carbamazepine, diclofenac, ibuprofen, propranolol, acebutolol, sulfamethoxazole, amoxicillin, bromazepam, fenofibrate, fluoxetine and paroxetine. Moreover, an original test protocol was developed to detect sublethal effects arising during the embryonic development of zebrafish exposed to these pharmaceuticals. The results provide an original set of acute and chronic data from which we calculated acute/chronic ratios, which varied by one to three orders of magnitude, depending on species and drug. These results show the need for data on chronic sublethal effects for ecosystem environmental risk assessments. This work was carried out as part of ENIMED, a French national project funded by PNETOX (French National Program for Ecotoxicology).