Epidemiologia de esgoto como estratégia para mapeamento do consumo de cocaína em centros urbanos : breve revisão

Abstract

New strategies have been adopted to estimate drug abuse, in which stands out the “wastewaterbased epidemiology”. This methodology allows illicit drug abuse to be estimated from the determination of the concentration of their metabolites in raw sewage, taking in consideration the excretion rate of wich metabolite that is excreted by the body and/or of the unchanged drug, the sewage flow rate in the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and its population. The wastewater-based epidemiology has been widely used to estimate drug abuse, in which cocaine and its main metabolite, the benzoylecgonine (BE), are among the most investigated substances. It was made a literature review of the articles that were published between 2008 and 2022, to compare the whole process of cocaine concentration determination in waterwaters, through wastewater-base epidemiology, including sampling techniques, instrumental analysis and consumption rates. Seventeen studies have been investigated, on the parameters: location, number of WWTPs in wich the samples were collected from, population, cocaine metabolites, sampling methods, instrumental techniques and results. The liquid chromatography is the most used method to determinate cocaine and its metabolites, while 24h composite sampling prevails. For samples treatment, solid phase extraction is the most used technique. The biggest cocaine consuption rate was found in Lubbock (Texas, USA), of 4300 ± 500 mg/day/1000 inhabitants.