Fluoroquinolone antibiotics are widely used in human and veterinary medicine and are ubiquitous in the environment worldwide. This paper recapitulates the occurrence, fate, and ecotoxicity of fluoroquinolone antibiotics in various environmental media. The toxicity effect is reviewed based on in vitro and in vivo experiments referring to many organisms, such as microorganisms, cells, higher plants, and land and aquatic animals. Furthermore, a comparison of the various toxicology mechanisms of fluoroquinolone antibiotic residues on environmental organisms is made. This study identifies gaps in the investigation of the toxic effects of fluoroquinolone antibiotics and mixtures of multiple fluoroquinolone antibiotics on target and nontarget organisms. The study of the process of natural transformation toward drug-resistant bacteria is also recognized as a knowledge gap. This review also details the combined toxicity effect of fluoroquinolone antibiotics and other chemicals on organisms and the adsorption capacity in various environmental matrices, and the scarcity of data on the ecological toxicology evaluation system of fluoroquinolone antibiotics is identified. The present study entails a critical review of the literature providing guidelines for the government to control the discharge of pollutants into the environment and formulate policy coordination. Future study work should focus on developing a standardized research methodology for fluoroquinolone antibiotics to guide enterprises in the design and production of drugs with high environmental biocompatibility.
1 October 2018 in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology
As plastic products are widely used in all walks of life, plastic waste is also accumulating in the environment. Today, microplastic pollution in the soil environment has become an environmental issue of global concern. Compared with the water environment, the research on microplastics in the soil environment is relatively lacking. Based on the above situation, this paper systematically reviews the distribution characteristics, influencing factors, and environmental and ecological risks of microplastics in the soil environment. The abundance, distribution characteristics, and impacts of microplastics in soils globally in recent years are reviewed in detail. Our review suggests that most scholars only focus on the surface soil, and the determination of the accumulation of microplastics in the soil as a whole is still lacking, and there is still no uniform standard for sampling techniques, extraction methods, analytical procedures, and even expression units for soil microplastics. The distribution of microplastics in soil is affected by human factors, natural factors, and the physical and chemical properties of the plastics themselves. We also focused on the analysis of the environmental risks arising from the accumulation of microplastics in soil interacting with metals and organic pollutants, and found that large research gaps exist in the interaction between microplastics and pollutants in the soil and the mechanism of compound pollution. The impact and ecological risks of microplastics on animals, microorganisms, and plants in the soil are explained. Moreover, key suggestions for future research are presented based on the current research status, and we call for more efforts focusing on the occurrence and fate of microplastics in the soil environment.