PARENT SESSION

1H c (2) - Pharmaceuticals
Hall 6
8:30 AM - 10:15 AM, Thursday, 1 May 2003
Chair: Tolls, J.¹, ¹
Co-chair: Kümmerer, K.², ²

(TH6/4) Different behaviour of tetracyclines and sulfonamides in sandy soils fertilized with liquid manure.

Hamscher, Gerd¹, Pawelzick, Heike¹, Höper, Heinrich², Nau, Heinz¹, ¹ Department of Food Toxicology, School of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany² Geological Survey of Lower Saxony, Bremen, Bremen, Germany

ABSTRACT- There is still very little known about the exposure, the fate and the effects of veterinary drugs in the environment. Recently we could demonstrate with efficient sample pretreatment and sophisticated LC-ESI-MS-MS procedures that tetracyclines (TCs) are persistent and can accumulate in sandy soils after repeated fertilizations with liquid manure [Hamscher et al., Anal. Chem. 74, 1509-1518, 2002]. We continued these studies in 2002 and observed a further accumulation of TC in soil with a maximum concentration of 500 g/kg, but no leaching of the drug into deeper soil segments or groundwater was observed. Furthermore, we developed comparable analytical methods for the detection of various sulfonamides in liquid manure, soil, soil water and ground water. It could be shown by investigating the same fields as used for the TC-study, that sulfamethazine (= sulfadimidine) occured in significantly lower concentrations (1-11 g/kg) than TC in the plough layer. Although there were apparently low concentrations in soil, we could detect sulfamethazine with a maximum concentration of 0.12 g/L in suction probes at 1.4 m below soil surface over a period of 3 successive samplings within 1 month in spring 2002. Further investigations in autumn 2002 confirmed these findings. This provides - to our knowledge - the first direct evidence for a continuous leaching of a veterinary drug from soil into groundwater under field conditions. We conclude from our investigations that TCs and sulfonamides show different behaviour in sandy soils. One explanation may be the difference in the sorption coefficients of these drugs in soil indicating (in part) their different mobility in that ecosystem.

Key words: soil contamination, antibiotic, groundwater contamination