ABSTRACT
LING-HUI SHENG, HONG-RUI CHEN, YING-BIN HUO, JING WANG, YU ZHANG, MIN YANG, AND HONG-XUN ZHANG
10.1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, more and more human-use pharmaceuticals and their metabolites have been found in waters from municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) [1,2,3,4,5]. The antidepressant drugs are a class of neuroactive compounds that act as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and serotonin noradrenergic reuptake inhibitors, and some of their metabolites also retain the pharmacologic activity and are capable of contributing to serotonin reuptake inhibition [6,7,8]. The unaltered drugs or their main metabolites have been detected in municipal wastewaters in many countries [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16].
