Due to the shortage of fresh water in semiarid and arid zones, reclaimed wastewater is becoming an important source of irriga-tion. In the past decade, there have been a number of reports of wastewater effluents containing active pharmaceutical compounds (PCs) (Ternes, 1998; Tixier et al., 2003; Clara et al., 2004; Miao et al., 2005; Spongberg and Witter, 2008; Calisto and Esteves, 2009; Kummerer, 2009a; Segura et al., 2009), some of which have also been detected in the waterways at many sites (Kolpin et al., 2002; Zhang et al., 2008b). Pharmaceutical compounds are of po-tential concern because they are highly adsorbable, resulting in a tendency to accumulate in soils, sediments and tissues (Díaz-Cruz et al., 2003; Drillia et al., 2005; Hari et al., 2005; Loffler et al., 2005; Williams and Adamsen, 2006). Studies have shown that PCs con-centrations in the drinking water are low (typically