Drugging the Environment

[Weird]

if we can effect it negatively we can effect it positively, the power of nature or our ability to effect it to either end is undeniable, and while the source of purpose might cause disagreement and discontent, the underlying reality that this is how it works, is undeniable.

The difficulty is that each individual has the capacity to function in a positive (humanitarian) ways or negative (narcissistic) ways to achieve a means to an end, and that capacity remains constant throughout our lives.

Most people see other people's narcissistic behavior and follow suit, part of the human behavioral viral effect.

It takes integrity and self control to eliminate it from your own life and patience, compassion and dedication to even attempt to share the same concept with others.

 

[aridbud]

Pharmaceuticals in the environment: a growing problem

Pharmaceuticals in the environment: a growing problem

The Pharmaceutical Journal, 19 FEB 2015By Brian Owens

"Drugs taken by humans and animals find their way into rivers, lakes and even drinking water, and can have devastating effects on the environment.

Drugs taken by humans and animals find their way into rivers, lakes and even drinking water, and can have devastating effects on the environment. In the image, the city of Chicago on the borders of Lake Michigan where large amounts of metformin were found.

Diabetes drug metformin entered Lake Michigan through treated sewage

When Rebecca Klaper searched for signs of pharmaceuticals in Lake Michigan, she got a surprise. The most common drug she found was one she hadn’t even considered looking for — metformin, a diabetes drug.

“It wasn’t even on our radar,” says Klaper, a freshwater scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the United States. “We only found it because the Environmental Protection Agency just happened to add it to the detection assay we used.”

Perhaps even more surprising was how far the drug had spread from the point it entered the lake via treated sewage. “Lake Michigan is huge, so we expected a big dilution effect, but we were still finding drugs, including metformin, three miles from the sewage treatment plants,” she says.

Klaper was also interested in what effect the drug might be having on fish in the lake. Metformin is used to treat diabetes, so she looked at the metabolism of fish exposed to a similar concentration of metformin in the laboratory, but saw no metabolic changes. Instead, she found that a gene related to egg production was being expressed in male fish, which indicates hormonal changes. She concluded that metformin could be having a feminising effect on male fish, and may decrease their ability to reproduce.

Lake Michigan is far from being an isolated case. A 2014 global review of pharmaceuticals in the environment, commissioned by Germany’s environment ministry, found that of the 713 pharmaceuticals tested for, 631 were found above their detection limits. They are found all over the world — in 71 countries across all of the United Nations’ five regional groups[1]. They were found mainly in surface waters, such as lakes and rivers, but also in groundwater, soil, manure and even drinking water.

Scientists are studying the effect of these drugs on ecosystems, and are trying to find ways of preventing the problem, for example by the correct disposal of unwanted medicines, improving the treatment of sewage and, ultimately, designing more environmentally friendly drugs.

It’s a real, growing problem, and it’s only going to get worse as the world’s population ages

“It’s a real, growing problem, and it’s only going to get worse as the world’s population ages,” says Gwynne Lyons, policy director of the CHEM Trust, a UK environmental charity.

We probably have an incomplete picture of the problem, however, because we don’t have detection methods for all of the thousands of pharmaceuticals in use around the world, and the analytical methods are not standardized internationally, so detection limits may vary, Lyons adds.

But some drugs are worse than others because of their potential to affect wildlife or people. They include antibiotics, antidepressants, anti-inflammatories and analgesics, beta-blockers, oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapies.

Drug delivery

There are three main ways that pharmaceuticals make their way into the environment. By far the biggest contribution comes from drugs taken by people or animals that are then excreted in urine or faeces.

“A good proportion of any drug is excreted,” says Lyons — between 30% and 90% of the active ingredient in an oral dose. And the metabolites of many drugs can also remain active in the environment after being excreted.

The improper disposal of drugs also makes a contribution — when people fail to complete a prescription or clean out their medicine cabinet and throw the leftover drugs in the sink or down the toilet. In both cases, drugs end up in sewage treatment plants, which were generally not designed to remove such pollutants from wastewater. Depending on the drug, removal efficiencies range from 20% to more than 80%.

A 2014 report by UK Water Industry Research found that in most of 160 sewage treatment works studied, several common drugs were present in the final effluent in concentrations high enough to potentially affect ecosystems[2]. The drugs included the anti-inflammatories ibuprofen and diclofenac, the antibiotics erythromycin and oxytetracycline, and the female sex hormone 17b-estradiol.

Some drug manufacturing facilities have also been shown to release active ingredients into nearby waterways, creating localised hotspots of pharmaceutical pollution. In 2009, Joakim Larsson, an environmental pharmacologist from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, found high concentrations of antibiotics downstream of several drug manufacturing facilities near Hyderabad in India — in some cases the levels were equivalent to doses given therapeutically[3]. Two years later, Larsson found high levels of known antibiotic resistance genes in the bacteria there.

Population crash

In most cases, however, the concentrations of pharmaceuticals found in the environment are much lower than the therapeutic dose. In rivers and lakes that receive treated wastewater, drugs are typically found in concentrations of 0.1 mg/L to 1.0 mg/L. Klaper found concentrations of metformin in Lake Michigan of around 40 mg/L close to the sewage treatment plants, but only 0.012mg/L offshore.

Because of these low concentrations, it can be difficult to determine what, if any, effect the drugs are having on the ecosystem. Much of the time the affected organisms are not in the public eye, for example algae or sea lice, or the effects are mild enough to go unnoticed if researchers aren’t specifically looking for them. “We generally don’t have the degree of surveillance we need until there is a population crash in a larger animal,” says Lyons.

Such a population crash occurred between 1996 and 2007, when millions of vultures in India were killed by exposure to the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, driving the birds to near-extinction1. The drug was given to cattle to treat pain and fever, and because people in India do not eat beef, the carcasses of dead cattle were left for the vultures to feast on, including cattle recently given high doses of diclofenac. It turns out that vultures from the genus Gyps are particularly sensitive to diclofenac, and between 10 million and 40 million birds died from abdominal gout and acute kidney failure. Three species of Gyps vultures are now critically endangered in Asia. Similar toxic effects have been seen in Gyps vultures in Africa and Europe, although without the same population decline.

But such dramatic and clear-cut links between pharmaceutical exposure and harmful ecological effects are rare. Indeed, the case of diclofenac and vultures is the only one in which the environmental impact in the wild has been solely attributed to a drug, according to Jason Snape, principal environmental scientist at pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Other ecotoxicological effects of drugs in the environment have been found — the veterinary anti-parasite drug ivermectin, for example, has been found to reduce the number and variety of insects in cow dung, which can delay dung degradation and potentially reduce the amount of food available to birds and bats[4]. But the consequences are generally milder, and the cause-and-effect relationship is less clear. And few drugs have been studied outside laboratory experiments.

Laboratory studies have found that anti-depressants can alter the spawning behavior of clams, disrupt movement in snails, cause altered aggressive behavior in crayfish, and affect learning in cuttlefish4. The anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen has been reported to affect reproduction in fish, including the delayed hatching of eggs, in the laboratory."