Abstract

Recently scientific community has turned its attention to the organic micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals and hormones, because the ecotoxicological effects of chronic exposure are uncertain. These substances are neither completely degraded nor monitored in sewage treatment, which makes the aquatic environment the main disseminant, due to the usual discharge of domestic and industrial sewage. Therefore, the current work aims to develop quantitative method using HPLC-UV-DAD-FLD detection in order to determine the psychoactive drugs fluoxetine and haloperidol, potential environmental contaminants in surface water. The solid phase extraction was performed to preconcentrate of the analytes of interest in aqueous matrices, in which it was evaluated univariate for reconstitution volume and pH, and via factorial planning 23 for the other variables. The best conditions were obtained by conditioning with 5 mL of acetonitrile and 5 mL of water pH 4.0, 100 mL of sample (pH 4.0), eluting with 5 mL of acetonitrile and reconstitution with 1 mL of water. The recovery rate was 73.7% and 87.2% for haloperidol and fluoxetine, respectively. The method was developed in real samples fortified with standards and real samples from three different points of the Belém river in Curitiba-PR.

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