Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Or are they leeching from peoples urine and waste?
A parallel question is whether the body of a deceased patient should be treated as hazardous. We do tend to bury or cremate them without a thought towards whether these drugs will survive and impact the local environment.
Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.
So here's the bit that I don't get. When my friend had to get her cat a medical scan, the cat had to have radiactive contrast ingested/injected. She was then told to carefully, without touching it, collect all poop made by the cat in the next 7 days, put it in this special container, then bring it back to the vet for safe disposal.
However, when humans have the same procedure done....no one cares? You drink radioactive contrast, then pee and poop as normal, it all goes down our drains. How does that make any sense?
Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan
If it's actually not safe, then they are irradiating humans for fun.
Cat shit stays intact when it goes to a landfill, and thus would cause a potential hot spot that humans would not.
Cat litter + indoor plumbing = not a good time.
I did think it seemed kind of silly though. Like the state is really gonna hunt down whoever threw away radioactive cat poop.
The whole thing was more about 9/11 / terrorism than environmental damage.
Not necessarily? My father had to collect his waste for disposal for a week following a scan where he had to drink the radioactive contrast stuff. Made easier by him being in the hospital for the duration and then some.
I thought that was common for patients on chemotherapy drugs? I remember seeing some sign in a hospital room's bathroom about it, but the details escape me.
Not even drugs necessarily. The theory is out there that a hidden but significant influence on society is large-scale male consumption of estrogen via contamination from women's urine.
> Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.
1. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from birth control pills?
2. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from women's urine?
(There are other similar questions, of course.)
These two questions are related in that #1 is mostly a subset of #2. But concluding that #1 is an insignificant source of estrogen doesn't tell you much about #2. Women produce estrogen on their own.
It's actually a massive problem in the West, especially the US, that the average person is exposed to tons of endocrine disruptors in the food and water supply, everything from estrogens in the water to plasticizers in your food wrappings on your take out or in the store.
Except for fluoride and chlorine. Small amounts of those chemicals in water are a net health benefit. Society has to be careful about adding anything, but 100% pure water isn't the healthiest choice no matter what the commercials say.
Also iodine in salt.
I also wonder about fluoride's benefits if we use toothpaste and mouthwash that has it. For example, I know people on well water or city water without it that don't have teeth issues.
Also, they are generally using chloramine, not sodium hypochlorite.
That is - assuming the natural levels are healthy for us.
Perhaps we could build some sort of hyper loop to send them in bulk to speed up the process.
Diagram of the idea, reversed https://xkcd.com/1599/
Where did your conclusion come from? Why would adding extra waste (the bottles) to the equation result in less contamination? What about my statement made you think "this man wants people to bottle their waste, rather than maintaining/improving existing infrastructure that addresses the issue"?
"No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him."
- Collateral (2004 film)
No, of course not.
What I am saying is that our best shot at getting pharmaceuticals out of fresh water is better sewer & water treatment. We can control that. It is implausible to control people who are, within the privacy of their bathroom, chucking random things down the toilet. The only thing that would stop that behavior is immediate consequences to them personally.
Edit: And this assumes it is all people chucking drugs down the toilet. If it's coming through their urine, then we're definitely back to water treatment being the only plausible answer.
I didn't see a mention of an overall solution in the article. I see they mention that leaky pipes could be the cause for that stream. Is there evidence to suggest that the sewage treatment facility actually removes these chemicals?