According to The Mail Online:
Researchers at Florida International University and the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust – a nonprofit based in Miami and focused on bonefish and tarpon conservation – studied the two types of fish found in Biscayne Bay and the Florida Keys since 2018.
They collected blood and tissue samples from 93 bonefish and tarpon in the area, and found that each one had an average of seven drugs in its system – including antidepressants, blood pressure medications, prostate treatment medications, antibiotics and pain relievers.
One fish even had a total of 17 different drugs in its tissues, the study found, and the researchers found pharmaceuticals in the bonefish prey – including crabs and shrimp.
These drugs can affect every aspect of fish life, including their feeding habits, sociability and migratory behavior – threatening the already diminishing bonefish population in the area.
‘These findings are truly alarming,’ Jennifer Rehaga, a coastal and fish ecologist and associate professor at the university said in a statement.
‘Pharmaceuticals are an invisible threat, unlike algal blooms or turbid waters,’ she explained.
‘Yet these results tell us that they are a formidable threat to our fisheries, and highlight the pressing need to address our longstanding wastewater infrastructure issues…’
Meanwhile, the study from the Florida International University reports, nearly 5 billion prescriptions are filed each year in the US – with IQVIA reporting that in 2020, a total of 6.3 billion prescriptions were dispensed.
Yet there are still no environmental regulations for the disposal of the pharmaceuticals – which can be released through one’s urine and wind up in freshwater bodies like lakes and rivers because the water treatment systems cannot fully filter out the traces of the drug.
Alarming, for sure.
But what about the state of domestic drinking water in Florida and everywhere else? What about the UK?
According to an article on the Brunel University website dated 2016:
Every time you enjoy a cool, clear glass of tap water, you could be drinking a cocktail of other people’s second-hand medications.That is thanks to the fact that today’s pharmaceuticals have been designed to be stable and long-lasting.
While that makes their doses reliably consistent, it also means that a substantial amount of the prescribed drugs that people take goes through their bodies and out into waste water.
Ultimately a proportion of these drugs pours unaltered through the sewage filtering system and re-enters our domestic supply.
And the amount of medicines now being excreted into the water is stunning. Nearly half of women and men in England now regularly take prescription drugs — with a significant proportion taking at least three prescriptions each, according to official figures (with antidepressants, statins and painkillers among the most commonly prescribed medications).
And we’re effectively taking some of what they’re taking, as recent research has found. For example, in May, a study in the journal, Environmental Science and Technology Letters, which analysed the water from 59 small streams in the U.S. for the presence of 108 pharmaceuticals, found the anti-diabetic drug, metformin, in almost all of them.
One river alone contained 45 different prescribed drugs, including the anti-epileptic medication carbamazepine; the muscle relaxant, methocarbamol, and the opioid painkiller tramadol.
And when Israeli scientists tested people who had been eating crops irrigated with treated wastewater, they found their urine carried significant levels of the epilepsy drug carbamazepine.
Professor Benny Chefetz, an environmental scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who conducted the study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology in March, says that because the levels are 10,000 times lower than from a 400 milligram pill, they should not instantly affect healthy adults.
But he told reporters, ‘We don’t know what will happen with small children exposed to low levels of pharmaceuticals for a generation.’
Another concern is that these drugs — even in minuscule amounts — might have a long-term effect on adults, too.
‘We don’t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,’ says one of the world’s leading experts, Dr Klaus Kuemmerer, professor of sustainable chemistry at Germany’s University of Luneberg.
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