Evolution, Pollution and Boys: What you flush down the toilet does matter By Anne Stanton Are you feeling peppy for no good reason these days? Chances are there’s caffeine in your drinking water. Not to mention trace amounts of hormones, acetaminophen (Tylenol), herbicides, anxiety medications and antibiotics (to name a few) that are routinely flushed down the drain and end up coming back out of your tap. Toxins in our drinking water have long been a concern, even locally. Back in 1978, three University of Washington students began a study on herring gulls on Bellows Island near Northport and two other Great Lakes islands. The eight-year study documented an unusual number of female gulls pairing up to care for mostly infertile eggs. The study concluded there were too few males in the colony so the females were doing what they could. One of the study’s authors, Gary Shugart, was a former student of Bill Scharf at Northwestern Michigan College. “When there’s a shortage of males, there is a changing in gender of the eggs or something working against the males,” said Scharf, who has since retired. “If you take a paper published in 1966 by a fellow named Jim Ludwig, and Jim is still around, still living, he found high concentrations of DDD and DDE, chlorinated compounds used in pesticides, in the eggs near Northport.” That doesn’t necessarily mean those chemicals, banned in 1972, were applied locally; they could have traveled here by water or air. The gulls’ reproductive abilities were believed to have been damaged through a process called bio-magnification; essentially they ate a bunch of smaller organisms with concentrated toxins.
HORMONES IN THE WATER Scharf still laughs about the jokes made on nighttime TV about the same-sex gulls. But he is very serious when talking about a new and emerging concern: estrogen, a female hormone, and other chemicals that act as hormone disruptors. Since some chemicals are biological messengers, incredibly tiny amounts can severely disrupt an animal’s reproductive development and are feminizing pockets of animals around the world. For the past five or six years, Scharf has been collecting eggs at Bellows Island and sending them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The findings are unpublished at this point, but Scharf believes that studies like these are vital; wildlife is a sentinel to what may happen to humans. A dramatic concern is human infertility. In the last 50 years, the average sperm count in healthy men worldwide has dropped by half, and scientists suspect that environmental pollution is a contributor, according to a landmark 1990 Danish study. A 2008 report, published by the charity ChemTrust, summarized 250 scientific studies around the world. It showed a wide range of common chemicals is feminizing males, including snapping turtles around the Great Lakes, hemaphrodite polar bears with both sex organs, and two-thirds of white-tailed deer in Montana born with genital abnormalities, Geoffrey Lean reported in The Independent.
COMPLEX QUESTION The issue of chemicals -- with thousands of them untested for safety and their impact on mammals -- is a huge and complex question, said Chris Grobbel, a Traverse City-based environmental consultant. “We have had the alarm rung that the most vulnerable species in the fresh water systems are evidencing problems. It’s a great unknown at what level this impacts humans,” he said. “There are many, many ways to be exposed. From my perspective, the science has not caught up with the ability to answer the question: What does this mean for humans?” Chemical exposure comes from everywhere—for kids, it’s often inhaling dust from contaminated soils. For adults, it’s largely through eating food and drinking water. Fetuses are vulnerable because some chemicals cross the placental barrier or are consumed through mother’s milk, Grobbel said. One concern has focused on medical waste in the water. Only about 55% of prescription medicine that’s purchased is actually taken, and much of the excess gets flushed or poured down the drain, according to 2007 data compiled by the Teleosis Institute in California. The amount that is excreted by humans in the form of diarrhea, urine, and throwing up is poorly understood, according to an Alliance for the Great Lakes report.
DRUG TESTING Only recently have tests become refined enough to even identify trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in the water. Among them are phthalates (pronounced thalates), a plastic softener used to make kids toys, cosmetics, food wrapping, and flame retardants. It’s blamed as a gender bender in mammals, along with bisphenol A, which is used to make hard plastics, including baby bottles. A recent study shows that boys born to mothers who use hair spray (which contain phthalates) are more likely to show signs of feminization. The defects showing up in boys are myriad and most have to do with their penises—micro-penises, undescended testes, hidden penises, the opening of the urethra at the top or on the bottom of the penis. Since 1992, there have been 16,801 boys in the state of Michigan thus afflicted, according to the most recent Birth Defects by Detailed Diagnosis government report. The state also tracks total number of birth defects, and, again boys take it on the chin, with 80,350 boys suffering from birth defects compared to 51,865 girls in the years 1997 to 2007. Drawing conclusions is impossible since pollution is just one of many causes of birth defects.
BIRTH RATIOS Another marker: the number of boys born. The historic rate of boys to girls is 106 boys to 100 girls. In some places in the world, the number is starting to inch down. In Michigan, the rate over the last seven years has averaged 104.8 boys to 100 girls. In Lake County, one of the state’s poorest counties, the birth rate of girls to boys was almost exactly equal, according to State of Michigan statistics. Then there is the First Nation community near Sarnia, a highly industrialized city in Ontario, where two girls are born for every boy, according to a 2005 report, “Declining Sex Ratio in a First Nation Community.” “New findings from researchers… confirm that more girls than boys are born in some Canadian communities. The cause of the phenomenon is airborne pollutants called dioxins that can alter normal sex ratios, even when the source of the pollution is kilometers away,” wrote Terri Hansen, Environment and Science reporter.
UNWANTED MEDICINE As tests have become more sensitive to detect parts per trillion, it’s been possible to detect the presence of pharmaceuticals in water. The first national scale examination of contaminants in the water occurred in 2002 with a U.S. Geological Survey. “The disturbing results showed a broad range of chemicals occurring in mixtures at low concentrations in residential, industrial and agricultural wastewaters. The chemicals detected included human and veterinary drugs, natural and synthetic hormones, detergent metabolites, plasticizers, insecticides and fire retardants. One or more of these chemicals were found in 80% of the streams sampled. Half of the streams contained seven or more of these chemicals,” wrote authors of Protecting the Great Lakes from Pharmaceutical Pollution (2010, Alliance for the Great Lakes). Trying to quantify the harm of chemicals and the interaction of tens of thousands of chemicals is mind- bending and expensive. That’s why it’s been difficult to find funding for water testing, said Dendra Best, who leads Wastewater Education, a Northwest Michigan nonprofit, which focuses on this issue “The issue of testing is really complex. What should we test for? When and under what conditions? The real issue is cost and frequency. One set of tests can run $700 per sample run, and for it to provide any meaningful data, it has to be repeated at regular intervals under similar conditions at many sites together with a control site. A spike in antibiotics in one test may be totally absent in another,” Best said. “With thousands of compounds that may or may not be present at any given time, testing has to be a carefully thought out process. One of serious concern would be atrazene, a known endocrine disrupter,” she said. The nonprofit has applied for a two-year grant, which may include Grand Traverse Bay. Best believes that instead of testing the water, long-term study of fish tissue and birds would provide more definitive data of toxic accumulation. Her group emphasizes education, such as urging yearly well testing and safe disposal of pharmaceutical drugs.
DON’T FLUSH IT AWAY Except for a class of highly toxic medicines—physotigmine, warfarin, and nine chemotherapy drugs—there is little state or federal regulation over the disposal of pharmaceutical waste. In response to growing scientific evidence, the EPA recently added one antibiotic and nine hormones used in hormone replacement therapy and birth control pills to its regulated list. The bad news is that it’s prohibitively expensive for waste water treatment plants to test for pharmaceuticals, though some do, and they are not designed to filter them out. A home water filter doesn’t work on these drugs either. “The stuff is going into West Bay and we’re pulling our drinking water out of East Bay, but we’re not removing it and we’re not treating it going out,” Grobbel said. “We can be pretty well assured we’re being exposed to it, but at extremely low levels. We are putting stuff into our bodies at levels that nature has never seen before, kind of chugging along like there’s no impact. We don’t know if there is or isn’t, but nature, although she’s whispering, is telling us to pay attention.” The single most effective way to make an individual difference is to never flush or pour down medications down the drain. The Environmental Protection Agency actually advises organizations to flush controlled medicines, such as Oxycotin, so they won’t get into the wrong hands. But now that advice is changing, with directions from the state Department of Natural Resources and Environment advising people to mix painkillers with kitty litter or coffee grounds and throw it away. It’s vital to dry it out before disposal so it doesn’t leach out of the landfill, Grobbel said.
PROPER DISPOSAL There have been a few organized efforts to collect pharmaceuticals, including: • Munson Medical Center and Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey are among 14 Michigan hospitals that are piloting a program to dispose and collect all unused and expired medications for future incineration. • Janis Russell, owner of Home Instead senior care, organized a collection effort that involved the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Department at the Holiday Inn last year. “In a five-hour time period we got enough pills to fill a barrel three feet wide and six feet tall. Some people brought in bags of them.” • Medical waste collection jugs have been placed in a few area pharmacies as part of the Grand Traverse County’s “Take it Back Program” (Google for the list of pharmacies) and “Yellow Jug Old Drugs,” which is run by the Great Lakes Clean Water Organization, has placed jugs in Traverse City: the Munson pharmacy in the former osteopathic hospital, Medicap at Chum’s Corners, and Thompson’s Pharmacy. A jug is also at Corner Druggist in Elk Rapids. • The Little River Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians is collecting medical waste. • Some counties do accept medical waste during hazardous waste collection days. • Wastewater Education received a Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation grant to help coordinate all collection efforts in the region. • Collection efforts, by law, cannot accept controlled drugs unless law enforcement is directly involved. Very few, if any, area law enforcement agencies have 24/7 secure containers for controlled drug returns. One model program, called P2D2, has been adopted by communities across the country to take back all drugs, but it hasn’t been instituted here.
Even if humans can mitigate the amount of pharmaceuticals that go down the drain, the problem is much bigger than us. Humans don’t ingest nearly the volume of pharmaceuticals that animals do, said Patrick Donovan of the DNRE’s Cadillac office, who sits on the Wastewater Education board. “Quite frankly, the huge bulk of medications used in Michigan are used in the agricultural sector for chicken, pigs, cattle beef, dairy cows and sheep. If you looked at the human population and the animal population, the animals outnumber us quite a bit. A pig is a huge as a man, cows are as heavy as three or four people. When you look at the size of the animals and the antibiotics and the amount of pharmaceutical material in the ag industry overall, it’s just incredible. It’s much more than it is for humans.” For more information on this topic, go to wastewatereducation.org.
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