Natural minerals and synthetic surrogates for environment and health safeguard: medicine, veterinary, agriculture and ecology issues

Adsorption of toxins and release of pharmaceuticals, are of large concern in industrial applications. In animal breading adsorbent are used for detoxification of feed from many toxicant substances produced by bacteria and fungi that can contaminate raw materials used for feed preparations. At the same time, slow release formulations of pharmaceuticals obtained by using mineral or synthetic adsorbent are being extensively used for the animal health control. Many recognised materials are also used for the reduction of acute toxicity mishaps humans can incur. Moreover, special formulations are under investigations for improving the target viability of chemotherapeutic drugs and other medicines. Pests treatments are today under examination due to cases of mortality induced to beneficial insects and of environmental contamination; so that, new formulations are needed to avoid this kind of negative effects of plant defence practices, as well as to enlarge in the time the activity of substances used as pesticides. In the last decade, many papers have been published concerning the environment protection or remediation using different raw materials or synthetic ones, which scope is to reduce the mobility of contaminants in water catchments and soil profile, and preserve groundwater used for drinking purposes. The topics lists above, are not exhaustive of the vast field of applications examined up today for natural or synthetic adsorbing materials. The exploration of sol-gel novel structures, including cell and cage expanded nano-composites, is the new challenge requiring advanced research efforts of many scientists