Everyday Americans dispose thousands of pharmaceuticals into sewage, it has been found that some antibiotics make it to wastewater treatment plants without deteriorating and end up in released effluent water which goes into rivers and may affect the environment. One of these antibiotics is Azithromycin, a widely used antibiotic to treat various types of infections caused by bacteria. In the past years, there has been a rising concern on the effectiveness of wastewater treatment on removing pharmaceuticals from the effluent water. Wastewater treatment plants use a variety of physical, biological, and chemical processes to disinfect water. Two of the most common chemical processes are chlorination and UV-light radiation. The purpose of this research is to study the effects wastewater treatment has in a commonly used antibiotic, Azithromycin. The effects against Azithromycin due to the processes of chlorination and UV light radiation will be analyzed. To mimic the chlorination process use in wastewater treatment plants, Azithromycin will be reacted with Sodium Hypochlorite, and analyzed using High Performance Liquid Chromatography / Time of Flight- Mass Spectrometry. To simulate the UV radiation process, Azithromycin solution will be immersed in a Microscale Photochemical Immersion Well and analyzed with HPLC / TOF-MS. We will present results that chlorination produces chlorinated byproducts, replacing a methyl group of the molecule with a chlorine. We hypothesize that UV light radiation may be a more efficient and safe method to use, since it reduces the use of chemicals and won’t produce chlorinated byproducts.

Effects of wastewater treatment on Azithromycin

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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