Drugs in the Water

Byoliveridley

When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Not at all surprising, considering that drug manufacturing releases tons of pollutants at high concentrations. The sources are very different from recent studies in the US where end users of the drug are the greatest source, and ciprofloxacin was again one of the drugs detected at the highest levels. At this rate, most bugs will be resistant to cipro in a few years.

In the end, water treatment plants cannot deal with this toxic soup. They need to be cleaned up at the source, by the pharmaceutical companies before they hit any waste streams. After all, isn’t recapturing and reusing the kilos of drugs being wasted good economic sense?

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  • Oil Sands work even with carbon pricing

    Byoliveridley

    via RAND_TR580.sum.pdf application/pdf Object.

    More on this later, but according to this lifecycle analysis, oil produced from the oil sands of Alberta can be cost competitive with crude oil even if carbon costs are taken into account.

    However, ramp up of production will lead to very high water usage and massive local and regional impacts.

    In other words, Alberta, you’re screwed, rest of the world, you’ll die at the same rate!

  • NY Times uses football columnist to diss Al Gore on global warming

    Byoliveridley

    Ok, I exaggerate a wee bit, he’s also a scholar at Brookings.

    Al Gore’s Outsourcing Solution – New York Times
    Shorter Gregg Easterbrook

    1. Al Gore is a big fat phony, so let’s not listen to him
    2. China and India will emit a lot of greenhouse gases, so it is useless for the US to control itself

    This guy should stick to writing about football, simple fact, the country that is the so called “leader of the free world” and that is currently the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has to take the lead, or at least participate in the discussion.

    As my favorite economist Dean Baker points out, he even gets his facts misleading on China’s GDP using gross unadjusted GDP instead of numbers adjusted for purchasing power parity.

    To be fair, he makes the valid point that a lot of gains are to be had by investing in India and China to make processes more efficient and hence reduce energy needs and emissions, but it’s not an either-or scenario. Even if India and China pass the U.S in emissions at some point in time, that still makes the U.S the third largest emitter, and if you look at both per-capita and aggregate consumption together, the U.S has to take major steps in addition to helping China and India with offsets and tech transfers. But you have to play the game!

    Is Easterbrook saying the U.S can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? C’Mon!

  • |

    Hog Factories Hit the NY Times

    Byoliveridley

    The tale is told from the pig’s viewpoint. Of course, as I have mentioned before, hog factories are evil and affect the people (mostly poor and black) who live around them in very many horrible ways.

    Pig Out – NY Times

    Of the 60 million pigs in the United States, over 95 percent are continuously confined in metal buildings, including the almost five million sows in crates. In such setups, feed is automatically delivered to animals who are forced to urinate and defecate where they eat and sleep. Their waste festers in large pits a few feet below their hooves. Intense ammonia and hydrogen sulfide fumes from these pits fill pigs’ lungs and sensitive nostrils. No straw is provided to the animals because that would gum up the works (as it would if you tossed straw into your toilet).

    In my work as an environmental lawyer, I’ve toured a dozen hog confinement operations and seen hundreds from the outside. My task was to evaluate their polluting potential, which was considerable. But what haunted me was the miserable creatures inside.

    They were crowded into pens and cages, never allowed outdoors, and never even provided a soft place to lie down. Their tails had been cut off without anesthetic. Regardless of how well the operations are managed, the pigs subsist in inherently hostile settings. (Disclosure: my husband founded a network of farms that raise pigs using traditional, non-confinement methods.)

    The stress, crowding and contamination inside confinement buildings foster disease, especially respiratory illnesses. In addition to toxic fumes, bacteria, yeast and molds have been recorded in swine buildings at a level more than 1,000 times higher than in normal air. To prevent disease outbreaks (and to stimulate faster growth), the hog industry adds more than 10 million pounds of antibiotics to its feed, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates. This mountain of drugs — a staggering three times more than all antibiotics used to treat human illnesses — is a grim yardstick of the wretchedness of these facilities.

  • Wow, Conventional Milk makes Twins!

    Byoliveridley

    44m.jpgHoly tentacular twins, Batman! This is crazy news, the first study linking the incidence of twins with environmental factors. The culprit is growth hormone fed to cows to increase milk production. According to this Wikipedia article, a third of all dairy cattle use Monsanto’s rBGH (or rBST) brand Posilac®, so obviously, use is widespread.

    FEED – July 2006 (from the Union of Concerned Scientists)

    1. Engineered hormone in milk may be linked to twinning. A recent study found that women who consumed dairy products were five times more likely to give birth to twins than vegan women. The study suggested that the use of engineered bovine growth hormone/bovine somatotropin (BGH/BST) to boost milk production in dairy cows may be related to the higher level of twinning. BGH is known to increase twinning in dairy cows. In addition, the rate of human twinning is twice as high in the United States, where BGH is used, as in Britain, where BGH is banned. BGH affects twinning rate by increasing insulin-like growth factor (IGF), a protein produced in the milk of both animals and humans, that promotes ovulation and may help early-stage embryos survive. A separate study found that levels of IGF were 13 percent lower in vegan women than in women who consumed dairy products. Read a press release about the study, which was published in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine.

    If true, no woman should ever drink “conventional” milk (non-organic, non rGBH free, etc). Twins are fun, I love my twin nieces very much, but they are much more difficult to carry and deliver, and there are more complications.

    Scary, but I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg as far as environmental effects on childbirth are concerned.

  • |

    As the developed world vacillates, Indian villages go under

    Byoliveridley

    Sea gobbles up five villages in 15 years- Hindustan Times

    On Wednesday, a big tidal wave hit the coast in the Satabhaya area of Kendrapara district. It swept away homes and inundated farmland. But was no exception.

    Tidal waves like this one have been a regular phenomenon in the area. In the past 15 years, the sea has come inside the land by 2.5 kilometers. And as many as 600 families are leading a precarious existence in the Satabhaya and Kanhupur areas due to this phenomenon.

    Satabhaya, as the name suggests, once boasted of seven adjacent villages. Five of them have now been completely devoured by the sea. Thirteen families lost their homes to the surging waters on Wednesday. There was, fortunately, no loss of lives.

    Well, the consequences are set for the next 20 years, but still no action from the US on global warming which will determine how things are 50 years from now, I am not holding my breath.