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Review on Genotoxicity of Hospital Wastewaters

P. Sharma, N. Mathur, A. Singh and P. Bhatnagar

With the augmentation of new technologies, changing demographics, economic forces, heightened patient expectations and legislative actions, the healthcare sector is evolving rapidly. Being the centre of cure, health-care facilities are important centers of infectious and cytotoxic waste generation. Major health care facilities such as hospitals use a variety of chemical substances such as pharmaceuticals, radionuclides, solvents, disinfectants for medical purposes such as diagnostics, disinfections and research. After application, some of these substances and excreted nonmetabolized drugs by the patients enter into the hospital effluents which generally reach the urban wastewater and thereby to surface waters. As genotoxic pharmaceutical compounds, including cytostatic agents, are discharged in wastewaters, assessment of genotoxic potential of wastewaters from hospital discharges is a domain of interest. Therefore through this review, the authors attempted to throw light on severity of environmental risk associated with mutagenic and cytotoxic hospital wastewater due to their careless and improper management.