If you’re a sad salmon, or a bipolar bass, cheer up, there are now psychiatric drugs in Great Lakes water. But if you are human and don’t want to commit suicide or kill others –which is possible according to studies and black box warnings on many psych drugs – then you may not want to eat the fish or drink the water yourself. The University of Buffalo in New York found drugs in the brains of several types of Great Lakes fish, and Diana Aga, chemistry professor at the University, said in a release: “These active ingredients from antidepressants, which are coming out from wastewater treatment plants, are accumulating in fish brains … Fish are receiving this cocktail of drugs 24 hours a day.”
Actually if you’re worried about getting drugs in your own brain, the concentrations of pharmaceuticals are still very small in drinking water – at parts per billion levels in waste water treatment plants and parts per trillion in samples taken from the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. But as we all know, what goes around comes around and without some way of removing pharmaceuticals from wastewater and drinking water, the concentrations could increase over time.
It’s no secret that sewage is treated, flows into the Great Lakes and ends up in the drinking water systems of many cities bordering the lakes. Around and around she goes, and whatever isn’t handled by sewage and water treatment plants comes back again and again. The Earth does this on a grand scale, but unlike astronauts who toast each other with recycled urine and may stick poop on the Mars capsule to help stop radiation, we lose sight of the large-scale recycling of waste in treatment plants.
Scientists have been tracking pharmaceuticals in the water supply for some time. Many cities now reclaim unused pharmaceuticals to keep them from being flushed, but those taking drugs excrete them in urine and feces. A 2013 article in Government Technology, for example, described how current water treatment methods fail to remove pharmaceuticals and that even small amounts of birth control hormones can affect the human body, perhaps causing an increase in prostate cancer.
Is there a solution? There are several ways to help. Don’t ask for or take pharmaceuticals you don’t need. Take unused pharmaceuticals to a collection station, don’t flush them down the toilet. Don’t eat the organs of fish. And there is some promising research on new methods to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.
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