A Pharmaceutical Gender Bender?

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

According to recent reports on the U.S. EPA Web site, studies have confirmed that female hormones are in such abundance in our rivers and streams that the aquatic life is being affected. They report a feminization of male fish found in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan.

This is linked to the exposure to both natural and synthetic estrogens and chemicals that mimic estrogens in the water. According to this report, the majority of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals are believed to reach the aquatic environments via the effluent released into the streams and rivers by sewage treatment plants.

The same phenomenon was observed in England and both sites were said to be downstream from sewage treatment plants. Scientists have also discovered that male alligators are similarly affected in Lake Apopka, FL, and they also found many infertile male panthers.

I see a lot of this estrogen disposal indictment; more than any other pharmaceutical. I never agreed with the slant that we cause all of this damage with improper disposal, but every week I see another one of those articles about tranny fish or femme frogs. I think that it may be possible that we have just overcrowded our planet. Let me expand.

Joke alert: As far as the feminization of alligators in FL (Queer Eye For The Swamp Guy), that may be more of a factor of their terrestrial environment. I’ll bet that lake is really close to South Beach. I’ll leave the transgendered panther jokes for someone else to have fun here, but always look for an Adam’s apple. That helps.

I think that we have established (ad nauseum) by redundant research that most of these chemicals pass right through our wastewater treatment systems (and we are the only species that have wastewater treatment systems). One EPA report states that:

“If you throw your pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) down the drain or flush them down the toilet, and if your home is connected to a municipal sewage system, some of the PPCPs would typically be discharged into lakes, rivers, or oceans, because most waste water treatment plants are not designed to remove or destroy PPCPs from waste water.”

Most septic systems don’t destroy the PPCPs either. On the contrary, PPCPs may destroy the bacteria in the septic system that aid in breaking down the waste in the household waste water. These helpful bacteria are also a component used in sewage treatment plants to break down waste.

So let’s say we do all of this research and spend a ton of money to develop treatment schemes that can reduce end of pipe levels at the human sewage treatment plant. In the end, we’ve done about as much good as stifling a fart noise at a rock concert.

Look at the four nations cited most often; US, Japan, Europe and the UK. Notice that less populated countries like Canada don’t seem to ever show up. There were about three million people and 330,000 human pregnancies in Canada last year, 800,000 horses, 15 million head of cattle (3.7 million pregnant) and 25 million pigs.

With the exception of pigs, about 10 percent of U.S. populations across the board and with a slightly larger land mass to dump it on (Canadian pigs run at about 40 percent of U.S. population because Canadians like that Canadian bacon, I guess). Maybe the real problem is that we are just overcrowded and need some better family planning.

With a Hormone Here and a Water Source There

I think that we oversimplify the issue when we concentrate on waste pharmaceutical products as the primary source of hormone chemicals in the environment. First of all, we harvest (from natural sources) more of these drugs than we manufacture. In fact, the sole source of replacement estrogen to reduce osteoporosis incidence in post-menopausal women is Premarin (PREgnant MAre urINe).

Less than one percent of pregnant mare urine in the U.S. is harvested for Premarin. That leaves the “Premarin” from the remaining pregnant mares in the U.S. to pass directly to the environment.

There are about seven million horses in the U.S. There are 100 million cattle, and 35 million of them are pregnant. That’s because dairy cows have to get pregnant to make milk, and beef cows have to get pregnant to make beef, and you rarely get more than one new calf per pregnancy.

There are about 60 million hogs. There are other large animals out there (elk, moose, deer, bear, bison, etc.), but let’s assume that the wild populations are dwarfed by our domestic large animal populations.

There are almost 300 million people, and four million of them were pregnant in the last year. If you take 9/12 of that number to account for nine month human gestation times, you have three million people that are pregnant right now in the U.S.

Yes, people are contributing hormones to wastewater naturally—what did you think made that dot turn blue? The Las Vegas wastewater treatment plant measured natural estrogen at 10 times the levels of synthetic estrogen in their effluent. If I had to guess at where I would find the most women on birth control pills (the city of sin) and estrogen replacement therapy (the city with the most old ladies pulling slot machine handles), I think that I would guess Las Vegas.

Conclusions

An EPA article also states that neither flushing nor trashing the old medications is a good method for disposal. It warns that children or animals could get into drugs that are simply tossed into the trash and once they reach the landfill they can trickle down into the ground water.

Those that know me will know that I can’t put ANYTHING in a nutshell. Most of my rants could fill a nutHOUSE. My main beef with the pharmaceutical companies isn’t that they make the drugs that we want to buy. It’s that they lobby against legislative reform for prohibition laws on the ones that they don’t make. Their obscene profit margins would make it impossible to compete with Ma & Pa growing their own crops of that herbal anti-depressant that works better than theirs and has far fewer side effects.

You rarely hear of anything but estrogen and you rarely hear of the estrogen issue in terms of hormone replacement chemicals. You always seem to hear of it in terms of birth control being the source of all of our problems. This begs the question; where is the source of the constant pressure to study this “problem”? It sounds almost like someone just doesn’t like the idea of birth control to me.

It’s obvious to me that our only answer to this terrible problem of pink panthers and gay-tors in FL and foppish fish that swim both ways is . . . forced prayer in schools.