Factories dumping drugs into sewage

Bully_Pulpit
Bully_Pulpit Members Posts: 5,501 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited July 2012 in The Social Lounge
Federal scientists testing for pharmaceuticals in water have been finding significantly more medicine residues in sewage downstream from public treatment facilities that handle waste from drugmakers.

Early results from two pivotal federal studies compare wastewater at treatment plants that handle sewage from drugmakers with those that do not. The studies cover just a small fraction of the 1,886 pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities counted in a 2006 U.S. Census report.

In one study, samples taken at two treatment plants down the sewer line from drugmaking factories contained a range of pharmaceuticals — among them opiates, a barbiturate and a tranquilizer at "much higher detection frequencies and concentrations" than samples taken at other plants, according to preliminary research by the U.S. Geological Survey.
One drug, the muscle relaxant metaxalone, was measured in treated sewage at concentrations hundreds of times higher than the level at which federal regulators can order a review of a drug's environmental impact.
Based on secrecy agreements with the researchers, the treatment plants were not identified.
USGS researcher Herb Buxton, who co-chairs a White House task force on pharmaceuticals in the environment, said it's important that federal scientists test the pharmaceutical industry's claims that their wastewater is not a meaningful source of pharmaceuticals in water.


"It's critical that those types of assumptions are confirmed through real testing," said Buxton.
In another study, Environmental Protection Agency researchers tested sewage at a municipal wastewater treatment plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., that serves a major Pfizer Inc. factory. Bruce Merchant, Kalamazoo's public services director, provided data that showed unusually high concentrations of the antibiotic lincomycin entering the plant, a drug the factory was producing around the time samples were collected.
"There's some product going down the drain," said Merchant.

While nearly all the lincomycin was removed during wastewater treatment, some did survive. According to a separate 2008 study, lincomycin combined in minute concentrations with several other drugs that also have been detected in surface water made human cancer and kidney cells and fish liver cells proliferate.
Biologist Francesco Pomati, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, was so concerned with the findings that he and his colleagues warned that chronic exposure to the combination of drugs via drinking water could be "a potential hazard for particular human conditions, such as pregnancy or infancy."
In earlier experiments, lincomycin acted as a mutagen, changing genetic information in bacteria, algae, microscopic aquatic animals and fish.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30267705/#.UA1ZQLTS5Fa

Comments

  • NotAName4
    NotAName4 Members Posts: 27
    Dosen't surprise me. Companies will keep poluting our water until the cost of potential fines are higher than correcting the problem. But governments are scared of being tougher in fear of them moving their operations to the far east where there are less repercussions.
  • JJ 1975
    JJ 1975 Members Posts: 336
    Call Erin Brokovich fast!
  • jono
    jono Members Posts: 30,280 ✭✭✭✭✭
    That's some ? . Corporations run this country and is destroying all of our basic necessities.
  • Shuffington
    Shuffington Members Posts: 3,775 ✭✭✭✭✭
    OUT with the EPA !!!!! To many regulations !!!!!

    wait?

  • sully
    sully Members, Writer Posts: 4,955 ✭✭✭✭✭
    In earlier experiments, lincomycin acted as a mutagen, changing genetic information in bacteria, algae, microscopic aquatic animals and fish.[/b]

    Not really such a big deal in humans. Lindamycin is just a derivative of clindamycin. It's an antibiotic that specifically targets the 50S ribosome in prokaryotes. Dunno why it's showing up in fish DNA, the lindamycin or its altered form in the wastewater is altered sufficiently enough to act on the 5S rRNA peptide.

    Nonetheless, if humans were to ingest it in sufficient amounts, you'd see fever, diarrhea, and pseudomembranous colitis.