**3. Results and discussion**

The environmental toxicity related to emergent pollutants has been increasingly causing concern among the scientific community, especially because a lot of studies have been pointed out to clear health and environmental risks [6]. Recent investigations have found essential results for other researches, as well as for the ones which study the development of decontamination processes of these products that are emergent and dangerous to the environment. Then, nowadays there is a scenery that leads to the revision and reorientation of conducts and legislations that involve environmental issues, both in national and international context [2].

In this perspective, magistral pharmacies are potent candidates to generate emergent pollutions potentially harmful to health and to the environment. Studies performed by the National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) have showed that in Brazil around 120 thousand tons of garbage is generated every day, and between 1 and 3% of this total is produced by health facilities, comprising the magistral pharmacies (manipulation of magistral formula). From 10 to 25% of health waste represents risks to the environment and population's health, including the medicines [16].

Among the magistral pharmacy aspects that worked as effluent collection, an important factor to be considered was the quantity of actives and other substances disposed though the sinks and which compound the raw effluents from the laboratories. In the present investigation, the idea was not only to know the characteristics of hormone laboratory, but also the other ones of the other laboratories, in order to compare the found results and to evaluate the LMH risk before the production and other points. To know how many items the pharmacy averagely produced, the average monthly production of six months was examined, accordingly Eq. (1), previously presented.

The found results were collected and placed in a worksheet (**Table 1**):

On the results, it was seen a more prominent production of solids formulae, which include orally used tablets. They represent more than half of the formulae produced in the verified period. On second place, there are the dermato-cosmetic formulae, and among them there are creams in which a multiple of actives are incorporated to. In smaller quantity, there are the Order 344/98 formulae, that, in accordance with the current legislation, require an extra laboratory. The same occurs with the hormones – main study object here. Regarding the manipulation of hormones, almost all the formulae (99%) corresponded to the manipulation of estradiol valerate, with a similar structure of the 17 β estradiol used for many clinical conditions.

As the purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the impact of ED in the effluents and of the formed COD, a CGMS analysis of the LMH sample was


#### **Table 1.**

*Quantity of formulae produced between January and July of 2014.*

conducted, in order to identify the presence of estradiol valerate ED, and another analysis was performed after ozone-based POA and UV for 120 minutes. The acquired chromatograms are showed in **Figure 1**.
