'Zombie' Hormone Disruptors Rise From the Dead 67
ananyo writes "Hormone-disrupting chemicals may be far more prevalent in lakes and rivers than previously thought. Environmental scientists have discovered that although these compounds are often broken down by sunlight, they can regenerate at night, returning to life like zombies (abstract). Endocrine disruptors — pollutants that unbalance hormone systems — are known to harm fish, and there is growing evidence linking them to health problems in humans, including infertility and various cancers 'Risk assessments have been built on the basis that light exposure is enough to break down these products,' adds Laura Vandenberg, an endocrinologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who was not involved in the study. 'This work undermines that idea completely.'"
Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it be in any way adaptive for hormones themselves(which disruptors are often very similar to, hence the ability to neatly disrupt the endocrine system) to have this level of durability, or is it much more likely that it's mere chance, biologically irrelevant until we started pumping the things out on an industrial scale?
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Re:Other perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like global warming. We need carbon dioxide. But too much of a good thing is too much.
I find it interesting that the default assumption of everyone looking at chemicals is that they break down and then never recombine.
Unlike trees in a forest, chemicals apparently combine whether anyone is watching or not. (It's too hard to see at night
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If we are going to worry about pollution and it's effects on our wellbeing, let's look hard at this right now.
Of course this isn't politically correct today. Global warming "prevention" fosters a totalitarian state. Flooding the drinking water with estrogen from the massive use of birth control pills might be a problem but that can't be me
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Birth control is a tiny fragment of the endocrine disruptors that are being dumped out there and estrogen is a chemical that's already present due to many natural processes. Hormones (Testosterone for older men, hormone replacement for older women, anti-depressants all hugely used by the US at least), are also only a small fraction of the problem. Agriculture causes all sorts of crap specifically designed to screw up wildlife that would otherwise attack crops, or to create the mutant animals that are so ver
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There are chemical equilibria designed explicitly for that purpose (self-darkening sunglasses contain one such, whose UV-exposure product is blac
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, it's more that the products of degradation are supposed to be [relatively] inert.
I think this is the key. As FFF said, it's interesting that the apparent activation energy to flip between active and inactive is fairly small. The good news is that it should be 'easy' to treat runoff such that you really do destroy the bioactivity - you probably don't need large amounts of energy to do so. The bad news is that dumping metric shit tons of the stuff in a small, slow flowing creek isn't going to solve the problem and you will have to build a treatment plant.
Farmers hate that.
What some asp
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I'm not sure that it would be "easy" to treat runoff. The article points out that the synthetic steroids are changed in daylight but then reform at night. It also points out that we can't assume that the "broken down" molecules are safe. Currently they only test for the specific original molecule but it could be that the broken down molecules are also bioactive.
They recommend using a bioassay (which tests the water on living systems) rather than just a chemical assay for the original compound.
Another proble
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What's the cost of banning this stuff? It's banned in the EU, so it's clear that it doesn't kill the industry, though it certainly will shift more consumption to vegetables and other meats. I'm not sure that's a bad thing for society, either.
Depends on which ones you are talking about: 'Endocrine disruptor' is a very, very broad category, covering chemicals used in a whole bunch of industries, united only by the fact that their similarity to various endogenous hormones gives considerable reason for concern.
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That said – I'm not sure we really want to seed our water with a substance that converts a broad family of small organic molecules into psychotropic
The chemical industry disavows this nonsense. (Score:3, Funny)
Chemicals are your friends. Untested chemicals are your untested friends.
Re:The chemical industry disavows this nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Chemical industry" isn't a thing that exists, is it? Most of these are from agricultural run-off, aren't they? The article certainly seems to suggest that. What you're really hating is modern farming practices.
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Of course it is; the chemical industry makes all the chemicals that everybody else (including agriculture) uses. Major corporations include BASF, Dow and DuPont.
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"Chemical industry" isn't a thing that exists, is it?
Of course it is; the chemical industry makes all the chemicals that everybody else (including agriculture) uses. Major corporations include BASF, Dow and DuPont.
Let us not forget Monsanto, still the world's largest producer of a number of nasty compounds including glyphosphate.
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Glyphosate has been off patent for while. The Chinese produce most of it and there are trade cases based on dumping it on export markets now.
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Glyphosate has been off patent for while.
And yet, Monsanto and their worldwide subsidiaries are/is still collectively the single largest producer.
Tired of Zombies (Score:3)
It was cute for awhile, but there seem to be people taking it seriously enough that they're changing their lifestyles based on the idea. It's silly.
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That is so last year... 2013->the year of the wight!
Re:Tired of Zombies (Score:5, Insightful)
The other day I caught a bit of a documentary on the zombie craze. It ended with the head of some zombie research institute saying something along the lines that deep down, they view the zombie appocolypse as a metaphor for any disaster, manmade or natural. The same tactics, supplies, and training you need for a zombie outbreak can also be used to survive another hurricane Katrina.
Zombie survival fantasies are also about the most tactful way to work through your serious interest in gunning down shambling hordes of your abhuman inferiors, without attracting social condemnation or law-enforcement interest.
This is not to say that all zombie enthusiasts are doing this, many are indeed, harmless LARPer types who are guilty only of perhaps not knowing when a premise is no longer amusing; but if you do happen to suspect that the Racial Holy War is looming, and negroid looter swarms will emerge from their slums to march on the exurbs any day now, a little fretting about 'zombies' is a good way to get your feet wet without making yourself a total pariah in polite company.
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i don't know how seriously or what parts to take how seriously, but there is truth in your answer. this is how i view the whole zombie apocalypse thing. however, i'm not thinking about the zombies as a metaphor for any particular ethnicity. they are a metaphor for the dangerous, desperate, and belligerent masses that would most definitely plague the world after a great cataclysm has stripped the world of its infrastructure and civilized veneer.
you may notice a common theme among many zombie programs. it is
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Sure, play the race card. Bigot.
I'm guessing you never had to protect your loved ones from looters. Get bent fool.
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The same tactics, supplies, and training you need for a zombie outbreak can also be used to survive another hurricane Katrina.
Maybe if you work for the New Orleans Police Department [wikipedia.org]. The rest of us don't really need to be shooting people after a flood. We just need food, clothing, and shelter.
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Just who do you think the zombies are in this metaphor? Ask yourself, who in that scenario was most desperately in need of brains?
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The other day I caught a bit of a documentary on the zombie craze. It ended with the head of some zombie research institute saying something along the lines that deep down, they view the zombie appocolypse as a metaphor for any disaster, manmade or natural. The same tactics, supplies, and training you need for a zombie outbreak can also be used to survive another hurricane Katrina.
It's also a plot convenience to allow the main characters to massacre hundreds of humans without people crying over the race, nationality, or color of the cannon fodder.
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Yeah, but the zombie meme keeps getting back up and shambling around the internet looking for braaaaaaainnnnnns.
Possibly Greatly Overblown (Score:4, Informative)
There a lot of serious problems with doing risk assessment for endocrine disruptors.
The first is that there is no known mechanism for most of the effects reported in the literature. Without this mechanism a real science based approach is impossible.
The second issue (and a general problem for that matter) is that many of the studies reported turn out not to be reproducible.
The following articles give some insight into this, relative to BPA which has been (possibly without justification a cause celebre):
http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0102-previous-studies-on-toxic-effects-of-bpa-couldn%E2%80%99t-be-reproduced-says-mu-research-team/ [missouri.edu]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21438738 [nih.gov]
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That's a bit strong, isn't it? We've spent how long now have either absolutely no clue or fancy-dubiously-verifiable-math to explain this 'gravity' nonsense, without appreciable harm to many of the disciplines that include it as a major part of their theoretical structure...
Sure, having to do your testing along the lines of statistical s
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Anyway, there is plenty known about the mechanisms of endocrine disruptors, specifically that they can mimic endogenous hormo
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The problem is that the concentrations of these agents in the environment tend to be extraordinarily low compared to the hormone levels that are normally present in the body, so it is hard to understand how they compete appreciably with the natural hormones. That doesn't mean it's impossible for these substances to have biological effects, but some explanation is needed beyond "they can mimic hormones."
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Tetrodotoxin affinity is not all that high, just nanomolar. Same for LSD. And natural steroids have very high affinity for nuclear receptors, probably approaching the practical limits for small molecules. One possible mechanism of getting higher affinity is if a lipophilic compound acts in the membrane phase, since partitioning into the membrane could amplify the apparent potency by orders of magnitude. I have seen effects of a steroid down to low picomolar concentrations, perhaps by this mechanism (I think
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That's not the ONLY way it's misleading. Most of the literature focuses on ONE pollutant. What exists in the wild is a mixture of several. Sometimes several subcritical doses of different drugs will produce an above critical effect. This is though to be one of the causes behind the coral and amphibian dieoffs. (Yes, a fungus is the proximate cause in the case of the amphibians, but exposure to a "safe" dose of a mixture of pollutants appears to have weakened their immune system to the point where it is
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I think the mechanism is "endocrine disruptor". These synthetic chemicals mimic naturally occurring endocrines by binding to endocrine receptors. This has been clearly demonstrated. It is disingenuous to say that "there is no known mechanism" in the literature. There have been thousands of studies and there is a clear scientific consensus.
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There is NOT a clear scientific consensus at all.
For example:
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/1/1.full [oxfordjournals.org]
and:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21438738 [nih.gov]
The British Medical Research Council is not some Koch funded faux science organization. This group has supported or hosted over 50 Nobel Laureates in science and medicine including names like Fleming and Crick and Watson.
There is NO mechanism that accounts for the reports of these affects at the extremely low levels reported, and as the above articl
Far from accurate headline (Score:2)
I like L4D and Resident Evil as much as the next person but this is an article about growth hormones, the cattle industry and how the byproducts don't dissipate as once believed. I guess if you want hits, just add the word zombie to a page.
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If you can post about zombies using bitcoins, you get four times as many hits. It multiplies.
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The NSA has zombies mining bitcoins!
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Disruptors? (Score:1)
In all seriousness though, this is something that demands further investigation. Going skinny dipping, only for her to later turn over and say "no, I've got a headache" is a PITA at best.
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If your partner is drinking enough of the runoff to immediately change her (?) libido, both you and your partner have other, more pressing problems to worry about.
Solutions (Score:2)
I can think of two really simple solutions right off the top of my head. Pour lots of bleach in the water, or place bright full-spectrum lights around the lake to shine all night. Duh!
Makes you wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of makes you wonder if the breakdown products from this stuff can get into your body separately, and then combine there. Well, it makes me wonder. Maybe that's because I'm not a biologist, or maybe it's because I'm a pessimist.
Sunlight and night? (Score:4, Informative)
Well here is what gets me... if they break down in sunlight, but then recombine without the light, well.... natural bodies of water tend not to be terribly clear. You don't have to go down far to not find all that much light, especially if the area itself isn't in direct sunlight....
So its likely that in many place, it doesn't even take "night", breakdown is likely only happening within a short distance of the surface.
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Ultraviolet, the real chemical buster of our sun's output has substantially better penetrating power than visible light.
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Ultraviolet, the real chemical buster of our sun's output has substantially better penetrating power than visible light.
Except it doesn't. Visible light can penetrate meters into water, but almost all ultraviolet is absorbed in the first foot and converted into heat. The rest is absorbed in the second foot of water. Ultraviolet is also absorbed efficiently by water vapor in the atmosphere. The water molecules then emit infrared radiation.
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Just like with pesticides that are known to wipe out bees, nothing will be done about this problem either. The corporate lobbyists own too many of your politicians.
Except of course that the pesticides in question are not "known to wipe out bees." There are (recent) studies that suggest that they may contribute to Colony Collapse Disorder (something for which science has an alternate, proven, explanation, but which is serious enough to warrant continued examination of all potential causes). Does this mean they are safe to continue using without a care? No. What it does mean is that any use of them should be done with caution. The information I have seen is that these n