As a result of the rapid development of the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, the biochemically active compounds they produce to treat human ailments, maintain livestock health, and improve crop output are finding their way into the aquatic environment. Surface waters supplying drinking water treatment plants may be particularly vulnerable if the chemicals persist through upstream wastewater treatment or appear in run-off from land application. During drinking water treatment physicochemical processes may remove some of these chemicals or transform them into products with unknown structures and biological activity. In order to better understand the impacts of biochemically active compounds on water supply and their fate during drinking water treatment source, settled, and finished waters from plants in North Carolina were analyzed using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Both atrazine and the insecticide DEET were found to consistently survive conventional treatment. Additionally, bench-scale chlorination experiments designed to simulate disinfection were conducted to determine the extent of chlorine incorporation into the parent chemical thereby hiding products from detection which may still have biochemical activity.Master of Scienc
