CA - Medicines, Chemicals Taint Water: Contaminants Pass Through Sewage Plants

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Title: Medicines, chemicals taint water: Contaminants pass through sewage plants

By Chris Bowman Bee Staff Writer

(Published March 28, 2000)

SAN FRANCISCO -- Scientists are finding urban America's rivers and ground water spiked with a dilute cocktail of pain relievers, caffeine, antibiotics, birth control pills and perfumes apparently passing from humans through sewage treatment plants. While barely detectable, the contaminants are numerous and widespread. And they are raising new environmental and health concerns. Synthetic and naturally produced human sex hormones appear to be changing the reproductive organs in fish downstream from the outfalls of treated waste water.

The risks to human and ecological health are largely unknown. The steady infusion of medicine-chest chemicals into rivers and aquifers tapped for drinking water is not monitored or regulated. And little data exists for gauging the chemicals' potential toxicity.

But growing numbers of researchers in the United States, Scandinavia and western Europe are finding the question worthy of further investigation. The latest findings received considerable attention Monday for the first time when they were presented at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in San Francisco.

The special session on the issue broke conventional thinking by shifting the spotlight on polluters from manufacturers and farmers to individual consumers.

"The fact that these chemicals get into the environment should show that every individual, whatever they do, affects the environment one way or the other," said Christian Daughton, a researcher with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who led the special session.

In one of latest discoveries presented Monday, a German chemist said he found high concentrations of chemical fragrances used in perfumes, shampoos and detergents and sun-blocking compounds from sunscreen lotions accumulating in the flesh of carp, perch, eels and other fish down river from sewage treatment plants in Berlin. Thomas Heberer,of Technical University of Berlin, said the compounds are long-lived in water and easily penetrate the cells of aquatic organisms.

In the United States, a team of chemists with the U.S. Geological Survey is leading the search for drugs and personal care products that are flushed down toilets and rinsed down drains to sewage treatments plants that are not designed to filter out these contaminants. Most sewage plants, constructed years before scientists could detect the minute contaminants, were built primarily to disinfect and screen out solid waste.

The USGS group expected to pick up only a few medicinal compounds when it began last summer. Instead, the researchers found a veritable pharmacy of low-level contaminants downstream from sewage treatment plants and livestock yards.

"We're discovering that there are a whole suite of compounds -- 25, 50, 100 -- all at low levels, but we don't know what the combined effects of those are," said Donald Wilkison,a USGS scientist who is sampling streams in the Kansas City area.

One of the highest-volume contaminants turning up in streams is caffeine, "the Starbucks effect," as leading USGS researcher Edward Furlong put it. Others include codeine, antacids, cholesterol-lowering agents, anti-depressants and Premarin, an estrogen replacement taken by more than 8 million women each year to treat symptoms of menopause and osteoporosis.

Less common, but more potent, are chemotherapy agents administered to cancer patients ending up downstream from some hospitals.

The USGS plans another round of testing this year at the same 100 sites in 24 states, including California. The results will provide the first national assessment on the occurrence of drugs, sex hormones and other unexplored contaminants in streams.

The search for pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment is a mark of how far researchers have come in isolating chemical culprits in the stew of water pollutants.

Stream contaminants A sample of some of the contaminants the U.S. Geological Survey is finding in the nation's water supply:

Veterinary and human antibiotics:

Chlortetracycline

Oxtetratacycline

Tetracycline

Human prescription and non-prescription drugs:

Metformin (anti-diabetic agent)

Cimetidine (antacid)

Rantidine (antacid)

Fluoxetine (anti-depressant)

Ibuprofen (anti-inflammatory)

Caffeine (stimulant)

Dehydronifedpine (anti-anginal)

Amoxicillin (antibiotic)

Acetaminophen (anti-pyretic)

Sex and steroidal hormones:

17b-estradiol

Testosterone

Progesterone

Cholesterol

Equilenin

Source: U.S. Geological Survey

"In the early years we looked for the really toxic actors that have immediate effects like death or cancer," said Furlong, a chemist with the USGS National Water Quality Laboratory in Denver. "Now we are starting to look more at compounds whose effects are more subtle and whose effects are less easily identified."

The body's ability to break down medicine varies widely by individual and by drug. Chemotherapy drugs, for example, retain nearly all their potency as they leave the body. Female hormones, on the other hand, enter the sewage system inert but are reactivated through chemical reactions during sewage treatment.

Sewage plants remove most but not all drugs and household chemicals from the waste water. Some persist miles downstream of the outfall pipes.

Antibiotics and hormones from animal feed lots also end up in waterways from spreading manure and sewage sludge on land. USGS scientists reported a wide variety of antibiotics in and downstream from hog waste lagoons in North Carolina, Iowa and Missouri.

Public health officials are concerned that the release of antibacterial drugs in the environment will build resistance in disease-causing bacteria. The new class of contaminants has emerged during the past seven years as a result of advancements in pollution detection technology.

European scientists were the first to report the phenomenon. In 1992, Heberer and Hans-Jurgen Stanof the Technical University in Berlin stumbled upon a cholesterol-lowering drug called clofibricacid while looking for pesticides in ground water. They soon discovered that the drug was in tap water throughout Berlin.

Recent research in Britain suggests that estrogen, the female sex hormone, is mostly to blame for deforming reproductive systems in fish. Throughout England, scientists have found female egg protein in blood plasma samples of male trout living below sewage treatment plants.

In 1996, U.S. researchers found effluent from sewage treatment plants in Minneapolis and Las Vegas causing the same effect in carp living downstream. Again, estrogen in waste water was the prime suspect.

"It would be news to most people that birth control pills are implicated in feminizing fish as well the industrial chemicals and pesticides that get all the press," said USGS researcher Larry Barber, a pioneer in the unglamorous study of sewage waters as sources of environmental contamination. Pesticides and industrial chemicals that imitate natural hormones, however, have not been ruled out.

Arid regions in the West are especially vulnerable to waste water contaminants, scientists said. Many streams run almost entirely on sewage effluent during the dry season. And many cities depend on waste water to replenish aquifers tapped for drinking water.

Barber recently traced an agent called EDTAused in shampoo and food products from a sewage treatment plant in Los Angeles County to well water tapped by residents in Pico Rivera and Whittier. The compound is non-toxic, but Barber said, "it means synthetic compounds are making it into your drinking water."

Complete list of contaminants on the Internet at http://toxics.usgs.gov/regional/contaminants.html

http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local02_20000328.html

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 28, 2000

Answers

Dee, Thanks for posting this. I think I'll avoid eating river fish.

There was a talk at my kids' school about puberty. The doctor reported that the average age of puberty in girls is now 10 years of age. Since it's the average, some girls actually start puberty at 8 or 9. They don't know why this is, but some have questioned estrogen in dairy products from the estrogen given to cows. Now we can wonder about estrogens in drinking water!

Good post, even if not y2k relevant.

Thanks

-- slza (slzattas@erols.com), March 28, 2000.


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