DO HUMAN PATHOGENS REPRESENT A THREAT TO AQUATIC ORGANISMS? A QUESTION WITH FEW ECOTOXICOLOGICAL ANSWERS

MALAFAIA, GUILHERME; RAHMAN, MD. MOSTAFIZUR; ISLAM, ABU REZA MD. TOWFIQUL; ARIAS, ANDRÉS HUGO; JÚNIOR, FLÁVIO MANOEL RODRIGUES DA SILVA

AQUATIC TOXICOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2024

0166-445X

While human populations remained small and limited to specific regions of the planet Earth, their impact on aquatic environments was minimal and infrequent. However, as humanity developed, the transformations of natural ecosystems increased proportionally, and (since its beginnings – dating back to the construction of large lead (Pb) water pipes in large Roman cities) aquatic toxicology has contributed to understand how these transformations affect freshwater and/or marine organisms? Furthermore, as discussed by Nikinmaa (2014) and Rand et al. (2020), aquatic toxicology has provided substantial evidence of the potential dangers of modifications in aquatic environments for humans. By covering multiple levels, from the subcellular to individual organisms, communities, and ecosystems (Jones & Lassiter, 2020), aquatic toxicology has been focused mainly on the identification and characterization of substances or chemical compounds that affect organisms, on elucidating their mechanisms of action, as well as the development of tools/methods for preventing toxicity in the most varied taxonomic groups.A quick search in the Web of Science databases (1st December 2023), using the descriptor “aquatic toxicology” (topic), allows us to observe how much the number of publications has increased significantly over the last 40 years (1982 to 2022) (Figure 1). Between 1982 and 2022, there was an increase of more than 16 times in articles involving topics related to aquatic toxicology. Therefore, this scenario has supported the recurrent warnings given by scientists about the danger and threats to aquatic organisms associated with pesticides/herbicides (Kumar et al., 2023; Li et al., 2023; Ranatunga et al., 2023; Andotra et al., 2024), heavy metals (Singh et al., 2023), industrial (Al-Tohamy et al., 2022) and domestic effluents (Luan et al., 2020), chemical fertilizers (Zahoor & Mushtaq, 2023), pharmaceutical waste (Del-Carmen-Gómez-Regalado et al., 2023; Dhillayan et al., 2024), personal care products (Kar et al., 2020), microplastics (Li et al., 2023; Harmon et al., 2024; Thacharodi et al., 2024), and nanomaterials, such as nanoplastics (Gong et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2023) and engineered nanoparticles (Dube & Okuthe, 2023).