| The frequent occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment requires an assessment of their environmental impact and their negative effects in humans. Among the drugs with high harmful potential to the environment are the antibiotics that reach the environment not only, as may be expected, through the effluents from chemical and pharmaceutical industries, but mainly through the sewage and livestock; because around 25 to 75% of the ingested drugs are excreted in unchanged form after the passage through the Gastro-Intestinal Tract. Tetracycline has high world consumption, representing a human consumption of about 23 kg/day in Brazil in 2007. At the moment, researches are being made to develop new tetracycline that incorporate heavy metals (Hg, Cd,... |
