Pharmaceuticals in drinking water and their removal

This bachelor thesis focuses on the presence of pharmaceuticals in drinking water and their effective removal. The first part of the thesis describes in detail the pathway by which pharmaceuticals enter surface waters that can serve as a source for drinking water. In the Czech Republic, these are sources of drinking water for Prague and its surroundings. Because filtration, flocculation/coagulation is not efficient enough, it removes only 20% of the drugs such as ibalgin, carbamazepine, naproxen and diclofenac. Therefore, it is necessary to supplement drinking water treatment plants with other processes such as adsorption on activated carbon, which removes up to 98%, ozonation and advanced oxidation processes, with an efficiency of up to 99%, and UV/chlorine removes up to 80% of pharmaceuticals. I found that monitoring of pharmaceuticals in drinking water is not systematic and there is a lack of setting of possible limits. The Želivka water treatment plant was found to carry out tests for pharmaceuticals only once a year, which I consider insufficient. I think that it is advisable to carry out more frequent analyses of medicines in drinking water in order to have a continuous overview of the situation. In addition, there are no long-term studies examining the effect of medicines in drinking water..