**1. Introduction**

All over the world, the presence of medicines and cleaning and health product waste has been identified in the waters, and nowadays they are classified as emergent pollutants. This contamination is the result of many factors, like improper domestic disposal; non-recommended veterinarian use, which is exacerbated, making the excretion of medicine active metabolites reaches the groundwater in higher-than-expected quantities; and product waste from pharmaceutical industries and magistral pharmacies (also called manipulation pharmacy), that dispose their compounds to the effluents. Although the wastewater treatment plants treat this water, many medicines still remain in the drinking water [1].

In general, it has been seen that traditional wastewater treatment processes are not very efficient in removing this kind of emergent pollutants. In biological processes, for example, the degradation efficiency is highly influenced by the presence of other macrocompounds, what makes the drug degradation, besides rarely, only partially [2]. Systems based on absorption processes have been recently proposed, which use standard (active carbon) and modern (pre-absorbed micelles in montmorillonite) sorbents. However, their efficacy is questionable [3].

In this perspective, investigations indicating the environmental risk of these pollutants and the methods of removing these contaminants are increasingly more needed, since neither the treatment approaches nor the awareness of this issue are enough. The legislation can be cited here. It must be updated when it comes to emergent pollutants.

The Brazilian Water Resources Management Policy aims to assure the proper water availability to human consumption [4]. The Order no. 2.914/11, of the Ministry of Health, defines the potability patterns to water consumption. In this document, the drugs with potential risk to human health are not mentioned [5]. This condition makes the compounds neither be identified nor even treated on the wastewater treatment plants [6].

Differently from the Brazilian reality, organizations like European Union, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization have already published guidelines and rules that warn about the risks of the presence of medicines in water and require studies that lead to their removal, in order to stablish acceptable limits for drinking water [7].

In this scenario, there are the magistral pharmacies, which, in the last decade, manipulated 8% of all the prescriptions in Brazil [8]. Nowadays, there are more than 7000 facilities like them over the country, and they are responsible for the small-scale and personalized medicine production, besides all the precautions required by the current legislation. In Joinvilly city specifically, the study site, at present 25 magistral pharmacies are registered with the Pharmacy Board and Sanitary Surveillance – which also attend the traditional segment –, dealing with drug and cosmetic demands, beyound the specialized pharmacies, that work with veterinarian products and hormone manipulation.

When reaching the environment, the hormones are then called endocrine disruptors (ED). These ED are defined as natural or synthetic exogenous chemical substances that, when in the environment, are capable of modifying the endocrine system, since they simulate the actions of natural hormones. These compounds might cause disorders that affect human and animal health [6], provoking, for example: breast and uterine cancer, increase in the incidence of polycystic ovarian, reduction in male fertility and prostatic neoplasm [9]. Considering the disorders the ED may cause in health and the environment, their chemical removal has been largely studied.

A technique used to remove ED is based on the development of advanced oxidation processes (POA), that correspond to a type of water treatment. POA promotes *Evaluation of the Use of Advanced Ozone Oxidative Process in Reducing the Danger… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95068*

the composition of highly reactive and little selective hydroxyl radicals, being able to act on chemical oxidation of a wide range of organic substances, like medicines, converting them in substances that do not present, *a priori*, the same biological interactions than the original molecule does. In ED situation, there is the estradiol, whose oxidant action leads to the decomposition of pharmacophores and cessation of estrogenic activity [10].

A way to obtain the advanced oxidation is through the ozone, which is highly used along with other oxidizing agents, like hydrogen peroxide, titanium dioxide and ultraviolet. This process has been showing efficiency in emerging environmental decontamination [11].

The use of POA in this case is justified by the previously presented points related to the need of reducing the risks. However, it is important to say that compounds originated from degradation (COD) will be formed, and their evaluation will be relevant as well. The evaluation of the environmental impact provoked by these COD and the toxicity hazards in different trophic levels may clarify the use of this decontamination procedure and the results on the suppression of a certain environmental risk.

In this investigation, the results found out by Pinto et al. [8] with *Euglena gracilis* algae will be taken into account, in relation to raw effluents from a hormone manipulation laboratory after the ozone/ultraviolet POA, being analyzed the alterations and solutions COD may cause, comparing these results to other ones observed in other (psychotropics, dermo-cosmetic and solids) laboratories.
