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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

It is in the urine. Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's Pandora's box.

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.

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>> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's pandora's box.

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?

It’s the same reason radiology technicians leave the room before imaging a patient. You want to reduce exposure to unnecessary radiation.

Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Or at least their caregivers assume they don't.

Correct. We poop into a pipe that takes it to a wastewater treatment facility where government employees handle it.

Do wastewater plants use Geiger counters/data loggers on waste streams?

I don't think that there is a need for monitoring since radiotracer usually have a short halflife, they usually use fluoride-18 (half life 110min) to replace a -OH or a well placed -H in a molecule that bind to the site of interest (ex: glucose -> fluorodeoxyglucose, levodopa -> fluorodopa).

> Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it?

Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan

Also composting toilets.

Many people in rural areas use composting toilets. It's a popular trend with those into self sustaining homesteads. The poop is generally going to be handled by a family member and mixed in with compost. After the bacteria in the compost breaks it down, it is then mixed in with other fertilizer and earth and used in greenhouses. The products grown in the greenhouse may be shared with neighbors or sold locally. Just adding for completely sake.

If it's safe, then this is just a revenue scam for the doctor/insurance companies.

If it's actually not safe, then they are irradiating humans for fun.

Why not both? It's not safe, but it's better than other options! Why I don't get is why the cat owner can't just flush the irradiated poop? Maybe litter in the pipes isn't good?

Why would you flush what rightfully belongs in the ground?

You could say the same for human waste

Human waste gets heavily diluted, essentially immediately, and even more so once it leaves the waste treatment plant for the local river, lake, or ocean.

Cat shit stays intact when it goes to a landfill, and thus would cause a potential hot spot that humans would not.

That makes sense, but then why not then advise the pet owner to flush the cat's poop down the toilet? Seems simpler than having a special container and a return trip to the vet.

It's not just the poop, it can be the urine, too.

Cat litter + indoor plumbing = not a good time.

OP said the vet said to return the poop, not the entire contents of the kitty litter box.

Hey, it's me - my friend specifically told me about collecting poop from the litter box, not the whole thing. But maybe she got it wrong, I'm not sure.

When our cat had a similar procedure, they advised that it was okay to flush the cat poop (assuming you could separate it from the litter).

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.

Wait, are you saying it's possible to construct a nuclear device out of cat poop?

> 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?

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.

> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive.

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.

Yes, but, this is sort of "priced in" so although your waste is measurably radioactive it enters the same stream.

> Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient.

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.

It's not a theory, it's a debunked hypothesis. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...

> Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water supplies

> 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.

There are two rather distinct questions:

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 appears that article say the source being urine waste of women taking birth control pills is debunked, it says nothing about the long-term health impacts of drinking water being contaminated with estrogen or what the sources of the other 99% of estrogens found in drinking water are. So while the causal link may be false, the underlying claim is still a concern.

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.

What does a libertarian have to say about market players preventing normal functioning of the market by restricting knowledge like actively resisting studies on products?

Don't like it? Move where there isn't radioactive water. /s

Get sick. Get put on a crap ton of medications. You found out that most have all sorts of crazy effects on the body. Ones not listed as side effects, or very rare, or even common but doctor has never heard of. Or your fun ones where 2 conflict in crazy ways.

Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.

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