New Insights into the Occurrence of Micropollutants and the Management and Treatment of Hospital Effluent

This chapter deals with investigations carried out over the last five years on hospital effluent in terms of the occurrence of micropollutants; new and promising technologies tested to improve the removal of key compounds (including emerging contaminants); the environmental and health risk assessments of pharmaceuticals residues and pathogens; and, finally, some of the strategies adopted in hospital effluent management and treatments through the discussion of some case studies. It emerges that the occurrence and treatment of hospital effluent are becoming issues of increasing concern also for countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Iran and Colombia, whose research groups had not actively participated in the worldwide debate thus far. Their interest in these topics highlights the shared, global awareness of the need to adopt safe, economic and technically feasible technologies for the treatment of hospital effluent to reduce the impact on the aquatic environment of hazardous substances typically administered or used in healthcare facilities. The experiences reported and discussed herein demonstrate the worldwide efforts that have been made and are still ongoing with the aim of reaching Sustainable Millennium Goal number 6 “Improve Clean Water and Sanitation” by 2030, as defined by the World Health Organization

Precision Electroweak Measurements on the Z resonance.

We report on the final electroweak measurements performed with data taken at the Z resonance by the experiments operating at the electron–positron colliders SLC and LEP. The data consist of 17 million Z decays accumulated by the ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL experiments at LEP, and 600 thousand Z decays by the SLD experiment using a polarised beam at SLC. The measurements include cross-sections, forward–backward asymmetries and polarised asymmetries. The mass and width of the Z boson, mZ and ΓZ, and its couplings to fermions, for example the ρ parameter and the effective electroweak mixing angle for leptons, are precisely measured: The number of light neutrino species is determined to be 2.9840±0.0082, in agreement with the three observed generations of fundamental fermions. The results are compared to the predictions of the Standard Model (SM). At the Z-pole, electroweak radiative corrections beyond the running of the QED and QCD coupling constants are observed with a significance of five standard deviations, and in agreement with the Standard Model. Of the many Z-pole measurements, the forward–backward asymmetry in b-quark production shows the largest difference with respect to its SM expectation, at the level of 2.8 standard deviations. Through radiative corrections evaluated in the framework of the Standard Model, the Z-pole data are also used to predict the mass of the top quark, , and the mass of the W boson, . These indirect constraints are compared to the direct measurements, providing a stringent test of the SM. Using in addition the direct measurements of mt and mW, the mass of the as yet unobserved SM Higgs boson is predicted with a relative uncertainty of about 50% and found to be less than at 95% confidence level