Drug Pollution In Rivers Reaching Damaging Levels For Animals and Ecosystems, Scientists Warn (independent.co.uk) 102
pgmrdlm shares a report from The Independent: Medicines including antibiotics and epilepsy drugs are increasingly being found in the world's rivers at concentrations that can damage ecosystems, a study has shown. Dutch researchers developed a model for estimating concentrations of drugs in the world's fresh water systems to predict where they could cause the most harm to the food web. The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, focuses on two particular drugs: antibiotic ciprofloxacin and anti-epileptic drug carbamazepine. Between 1995 and 2015 it found that rising concentrations of the drugs and the increasing number of water tables affected meant the risks to aquatic ecosystems are 10 to 20 times higher than two decades earlier.
Carbamazepine has been linked to disrupting the development of fish eggs and shellfish digestive processes, and the study found potential risks were most pronounced in arid areas with a few major streams. The risks were much more widespread for ciprofloxacin, with 223 of 449 ecosystems tested showing a significant risk increase. More worrying still, when [the researchers] compared their predictions to samples from four river systems they found their model was underestimating the risk. Pharmaceutical residues can enter these fresh water systems through waste water from poorly maintained sewer systems, or from run-off over fields for drugs used in livestock.
Carbamazepine has been linked to disrupting the development of fish eggs and shellfish digestive processes, and the study found potential risks were most pronounced in arid areas with a few major streams. The risks were much more widespread for ciprofloxacin, with 223 of 449 ecosystems tested showing a significant risk increase. More worrying still, when [the researchers] compared their predictions to samples from four river systems they found their model was underestimating the risk. Pharmaceutical residues can enter these fresh water systems through waste water from poorly maintained sewer systems, or from run-off over fields for drugs used in livestock.
i got to ask (Score:5, Funny)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I saw a (I think) Mythbusters episode about this once. The cockroaches were actually still too big to be immune to the radiation. Despite the common popular belief about this, they did rather poorly, actually. Some much smaller insect was just the right size. Some gnat or fruit fly or something. I forget exactly what.
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The average Republican you mean, not human. Humans are smart enough to realize that destroying the world is a problem.
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Re: i got to ask (Score:3)
Riiiiiight... Blame consumers for consuming. But don't even think about blaming government for failure to govern.
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Spent 2 years back in the 90s working on trials with poly-chlorinated bi-phenyls (PCBs, also the active ingredient of agent orange), where we raised tadpoles in water solutions with varying levels of PCBs. We had Xenopus Laevis (kind of the white mouse of frogs) and a host of eastern US rana species (green, bull, pickerel, leopard). Don't recall the dosages anymore. At the higher ones, the tadpoles wouldn't live to adulthood due to under-development of their GI tract and liver. At the lower dosages, how
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I got to ask... did the researchers find any actual damage done? Because that's what's important and I do not see that relayed in the article. When I read the article I saw of words/clauses like [paraphrasing]... 'may/could/can do harm'...'potential effect'...'elevated risk'... 'our model predicts'... 'link to effect'... etc. None of which mean environmental damage is occurring. The closest this article comes to stating actual environmental damage is this:
"...Carbamazepine has been linked to disrupting the
Antibiotic resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's a very real but smallish effect of the overall damage we're doing dumping pharmaceuticals into the environment. It's incalculable. Waste water treatment even in the best case will never be able to stem the flow.
People just dump their old pills right down the toilet without thinking, by the millions.
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Sadly, in today's world it is "educate instead of shaming, and you'll be swiftly ignored". With people like Betsy DeVille setting the standards for public education in the developed world (oh, yes, the US does, unfortunately, still have a lot of influence) education means nothing.
Today advertising rules, and modern society is a fucking popularity contest. The only result that matters is the polls, and these cater to the average.
And the average is abysmally stupid.
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LOL, I am not making an argument, but a statement of fact. It is sort of funny that you use those big words and have no clue what they mean.
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Die in a fire, lying GOP faggots. Nobody will miss the lies or opines presented as fact. You simply do not matter or even factor into a scientific debate on the merits, and given your lies on the topic are generally ignored now.
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Vote for my party. The party of openness, compassion and peace. Where all are respected.
Yeah. I think we know how Trump go elected.
They are not distinct, there are finite resources (Score:2)
You have no idea what you're blathering about. They're two distinct problems
They are not at all, because we have only so much money, and time to devote to policing either real pollution, or CO2.
Would you rather waste time reducing a gas that plants use to grow, or to eliminate actually unnatural contaminants from our ecosystem?
I choose to work for, rather than against, life.
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Climate change is worse for the overall health of a fragmented ecosystem.
That is incorrect, because fundamentally more energy in a system means more opportunity.
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Would you rather waste time reducing a gas that plants use to grow, or to eliminate actually unnatural contaminants from our ecosystem?
What is or isn't "natural" (a poorly defined term at best) is as irrelevant here as the fact that cyanide or ricin occurs naturally when it's in someone's body, killing them. What's relevant is the concentration, and whether it causes ill effects.
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It's statistical processes that make something natural. Eg. butter has been consumed by humans for thousands of years, and previously never by any humans ever. Margarine had been consumed for about 50. So food-wise no butter is the most natural, butter is fairly natural, margarine is the least natural. It's those "very little natural" substances and processes that we for simplicity call unnatural.
How natural something is isn't always correlated to how good it is for you of course, but in the absence of othe
Re:Fight pollution, not climate change (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the kind of thing that is much easier to get public support for than the hockey sticks and whatnots.
I'd like to elaborate about this point. The eventual benefits of a CO2 reduction, for example, are very difficult to acknowledge, because they could take years to materialize, if at all. Instead, the benefits of cleaner water and cleaner air can be easily and quickly evaluated. That's why there wouldn't be as much controversy for pollution as there is for climate change policies.
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Also, most people will not be personally affected by measures to reduce drug pollution.
Re: Fight pollution, not climate change (Score:1)
I suspect a lot of the money pushing the shrill "OMG the sky is falling!!!" climate change trope comes from heavy chemical polluters.
Almost everyone agrees it's a good idea not to throw toxic waste in the river. That kind of sentiment could really cut into corporate profits. Better to get the masses worked up over an inconsequential issue (carbon is very far from the worst pollutant) by feeding them outlandish scare stories.
Personally, I blame ... (Score:5, Funny)
... the cops. Every time they start pounding on my front door, I've got to flush my stash.
Widespread Waste Mismanagement (Score:4, Interesting)
A while back we went to go look at a work-for-rent cabin outside of Willits, on a supposedly permacultural demonstration farm. Turned out the owner had workshops there, and she had attendees shit in buckets in an outhouse, then literally buried the shit in a hole next to the river that some neighbor dug for her with his backhoe. This person recently gave the keynote speech at a local farm conference. So as it turns out, both municipal waste management systems and hippies in the woods are shitting up our water systems. You might say it's end-to-end.
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Your weird coprophile anecdote has nothing at all to do with the topic.
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C'mon, the username fits the story very nicely.
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It was actually coprophobia, because the primary reasons we weren't interested were the poor waste management, and that we would be responsible for dumping the shit buckets in the hole down by the river.
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Would it possibly be better to bury these medications (away from a river)? How about mixing them up with something first to decompose/denature them, or disposing of them in used cooking oil, used paint, or other household products that are discarded in bulk containers? It just seems that anything that makes it more difficult to get rid of these medications is prone to making them victim to absent-minded cleanup down the drain.
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I assume most of the medications in the sewage water are there because they are not completely metabolized, and we pee/poop them out.
Re:Widespread Waste Mismanagement (Score:5, Informative)
They have programs to incinerate (the only actual way to destroy these things) pills for free. People are simply too lazy to use them,
The situation is actually much more complicated than you're making it out to be. Some of these drugs can actually survive passing through sewage treatment, and treated sewage is generally discharged into waterways. That's why I brought up my particular anecdote — not only is that kind of behavior a hazard because of hazardous biologicals, it's also a problem because of persistent and stable pharmaceuticals.
Re: Widespread Waste Mismanagement (Score:3, Interesting)
More pharmaceuticals are passed via urine and feces than thrown down the drain. FFS
It might have been different in the past where prescription drugs weren't the biggest problem, but it is now. And it isn't just prescription drugs but many plastics (found in everything from residential plumbing now to furniture finishes to disposable eyewear) as well.
And biodegradable plastics don't vanish when they get broken down, they just get smaller and more easily enter waterways via everything from leaching out of lan
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Learn to read, FFS. They're two distinct problems that both contribute. OP was conflating them. Fixing one does not solve the other.
People flushing pills is a lesser problem than the fact that these pharmaceuticals are being excreted in/as waste. It's a result of using drugs that do not target ailments specifically, but have to wander around the body hoping they meet up with the problem. As we breed more resistant illnesses, we have to select increasingly non-ideal drugs to combat them. These drugs are more harmful both to patients, and the environment. The solution to both problems is the same — phage therapy. Unfortunately, that
Re: Widespread Waste Mismanagement (Score:4, Informative)
Distinct problems that both contribute, and you just added a third now.
I never claimed my prior comment was an exhaustive list of the related issues. That's your [faulty] assumption, which makes an ass out of u, and umption.
You continue to conflate them, which is unsurprising at this point.
They are all contributory. This is not as complicated as you want to make it. I understand that you are playing the confused victim of a complicated conversation, but it's not that complicated. Anyone who can comprehend the ins and outs of a modern computer should be able to grasp these concepts adequately to have a conversation about them.
No, phage therapy does not solve all these problems
It would significantly reduce the amount of medication required, so while it might or might not solve the problem, it would assist in its mitigation.
I'm trying to be polite but you're grossly oversimplifying.
I'm trying to be polite, but you're grossly simple.
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As you persist in mischaracterizing my statements, I can see that engaging you was a fat waste of time. I should really learn to just ignore ACs. The vast majority of you are not logging in not due to laziness, but due to an unwillingness to be judged.
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Username checks out.
Carbamazepine? (Score:1)
Odd medication to complain about. Crbamazepine (Tegretol) was a highly used seizure/epilepsy medication 25 years ago, and to lesser extent, used for migraines or bipolar disorder. Now it is rarely used for any of these.
I'm puzzled why there is particular concern over a medicine that is rarely used any more.
-- Josh
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I was surprised as well. Why not concentrate on estrogen as from my understanding it's causing the biggest issues in aquatic life. I guess that's too politically sensitive. Can't suggest the pill is causing environmental damage even though it's fairly well documented.
You may not be old enough to remember (Score:4, Interesting)
when rivers feeding the Great Lakes used to catch fire?
I mean drugs in the water are bad, but at least the fish get a nice buzz. /s
For the interested:
https://www.environmentalcounc... [environmentalcouncil.org]
i blame those liberal hippies (Score:2)
Hippies first appeared in the 1960s. Rivers first caught on fire in the 1960s. How much stronger of a link do you need?
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Well, correlation is not causation. More likely than not, it was the good-honest, conservative patriotic pollution that caused the hippies.
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Well, correlation is not causation. More likely than not, it was the good-honest, conservative patriotic pollution that caused the hippies.
Whoa. Mind BLOWN.
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Well, there wasn't a whole lot to blow to begin with.
Agriculture (Score:5, Insightful)
While other drugs may be an issue, the elephant in the room is agriculture. For vegetable, big ag uses all sort of pesticides and fertilizers that wind up polluting the water. For animals, they use antibiotics.
The antibiotics are not even meant to preserve animal health, although that's a nice side effect. Weirdly, animals on antibiotics gain weight more quickly, which is (afaik) the real motivation. But these antibiotics wind up in the waste, and from there in the runoff and in the rivers.
What we need is simple: an absolute prohibition on medicating animals that are not sick. Period.
p.s. It's a bit off-topic here, but: the prices for the antibiotics have to be cheap, for this to work economically. The exact same antibiotics for people are generally massively higher. An interesting comment on big pharma.
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Considering that Antibiotic use for anything other than illness has been illegal for a long time, and it costs money, I think you're woefully misinformed in current day agricultural practice. Pesticides and fertilisers are sparingly used (and agriculture does a lot of research on the minimum spray doses they can use; after all, that costs money too).
So your 'we need is a prohibition on medicating animals that aren't sick' already exists.
Re:Agriculture (Score:5, Informative)
Deniers (Score:4, Interesting)