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i wasn't sure which forum was the best fit for this, one but this seems as good as any.
we are excreting a hell of a lot of different drugs into the environment that have unknown effects on the insects and animals that end up ingesting them.
Quote:
An international team of researchers detected a vast sixty-nine pharmaceutical compounds in stream insects. When these insects emerge as flying adults, they can pass these drugs further to spiders, fish, birds, bats, and other streamside foragers. This way, drug pollution moves up food webs and in some cases exposes even top predators to therapeutically-effective doses.
“Insect tissues had drug concentrations that were orders of magnitude higher than concentrations measured in surface waters. We also found a diverse suite of drugs in spiders, indicating that drugs are passed from the water to prey to predator, thereby exposing other animals in the food web to drugs,” said Jerker Fick, a chemist at Umeå University in Sweden, who analyzed the insect and spider samples.
“A platypus living in a creek receiving treated wastewater effluent could receive the equivalent of half of a recommended human dose of antidepressants every day, just by eating its normal diet of stream insects. This intake is likely to have biological effects,” said Rosi. https://splice-bio.com/bugs-on-drugs...cal-pollution/
-wt of platypus = 2kg; wt of human = 70 kg; standard dose of antidepressant = 20mg (for example)
ie- 20 mg/ 70 kg in human corresponds to 1.4mg/ platypus; half that (as stated in quoted article) would be 0.7 mg
- dugs taken by people quickly reach a steady state dynamic- ie- each 20 mg daily dose taken in is matched by a 20 mg daily excretion. A flush of the toilet is ~ 3gal.
-that means a platypus would have to drink ~ a pint of undiluted toilet water each day to get that half dose of antidepressant. I doubt a 5lb platypus drinks more than a pint a day of any water, let alone sucking the juice right out of the sewer pipe immediately after a flush.
- even if the whole block is on antidepressants, sewer water is sent to the treatment plant where it's diluted with all the other black & gray water from the town. That water is then dumped into the reservoir where it is further diluted, probably 1000s- millions of times. (each citizen uses ~30 gal of water per day) A platypus (or any animal; he was being facetious in using this as an example) can't drink enough "tainted" water to get a significant dose.
What about concentrating drugs as we go up the food web? OK. Let's see:
-wt of mosquito (for example) = 5mg; Let's say this is a depressed mosquito who is seeing a mosquito psychiatrist and gets a full dose of antidepressant each day, ie-- ~20mg/70 kg = roughly 1 millionth of a mg per bug
-that means any bat, bird, etc eating mosquitoes would have to eat one million depressed mosquitoes on drugs a day to take in 1 mg of drug. (many times that if the bug was only getting its drugs from "tainted" water.)
- bats weigh up to 4 lb, but eat "only" 1200 bugs / hr ; even if they ate all day & night, they'd only eat 25,000 mosquitoes or about 975,000 short of a full dose of antidepressant.
This one rates real high on my BS-o-meter. How do they get away with publishing crap like this?
edited to add: Notice that the article "detected" drugs in samples. They apparently didn't quantify. You remember Organic Chem Lab? It's easy to "detect" a chemical-- just stick the sample in the gas chromatograph. It separates everything in there into a graph, and each chemical has a characteristic "signature." It only takes a few molecules to be "detected" that way. If the quantity were significant, they would have certainly have stated it to make their paper more impressive.
Remember, even water or oxygen are poisonous in high enough concentrations.
edited again to add: Thanks for bringing this up Ugga (if I may call you by your first name). It bears discussion. This is how science is done. An observation is made and it should raise questions that need to be tested. My post pointed out that the cited observation raises the question about quantification. My rudimentary calculations suggest that maybe it isn't really a problem. Aristotle would have stopped there. Galileo would have done another experiment.
Last edited by guidoLaMoto; 11-14-2018 at 03:48 PM..
-wt of platypus = 2kg; wt of human = 70 kg; standard dose of antidepressant = 20mg (for example)
ie- 20 mg/ 70 kg in human corresponds to 1.4mg/ platypus; half that (as stated in quoted article) would be 0.7 mg
- dugs taken by people quickly reach a steady state dynamic- ie- each 20 mg daily dose taken in is matched by a 20 mg daily excretion. A flush of the toilet is ~ 3gal.
-that means a platypus would have to drink ~ a pint of undiluted toilet water each day to get that half dose of antidepressant. I doubt a 5lb platypus drinks more than a pint a day of any water, let alone sucking the juice right out of the sewer pipe immediately after a flush.
- even if the whole block is on antidepressants, sewer water is sent to the treatment plant where it's diluted with all the other black & gray water from the town. That water is then dumped into the reservoir where it is further diluted, probably 1000s- millions of times. (each citizen uses ~30 gal of water per day) A platypus (or any animal; he was being facetious in using this as an example) can't drink enough "tainted" water to get a significant dose.
What about concentrating drugs as we go up the food web? OK. Let's see:
-wt of mosquito (for example) = 5mg; Let's say this is a depressed mosquito who is seeing a mosquito psychiatrist and gets a full dose of antidepressant each day, ie-- ~20mg/70 kg = roughly 1 millionth of a mg per bug
-that means any bat, bird, etc eating mosquitoes would have to eat one million depressed mosquitoes on drugs a day to take in 1 mg of drug. (many times that if the bug was only getting its drugs from "tainted" water.)
- bats weigh up to 4 lb, but eat "only" 1200 bugs / hr ; even if they ate all day & night, they'd only eat 25,000 mosquitoes or about 975,000 short of a full dose of antidepressant.
This one rates real high on my BS-o-meter. How do they get away with publishing crap like this?
edited to add: Notice that the article "detected" drugs in samples. They apparently didn't quantify. You remember Organic Chem Lab? It's easy to "detect" a chemical-- just stick the sample in the gas chromatograph. It separates everything in there into a graph, and each chemical has a characteristic "signature." It only takes a few molecules to be "detected" that way. If the quantity were significant, they would have certainly have stated it to make their paper more impressive.
Remember, even water or oxygen are poisonous in high enough concentrations.
edited again to add: Thanks for bringing this up Ugga (if I may call you by your first name). It bears discussion. This is how science is done. An observation is made and it should raise questions that need to be tested. My post pointed out that the cited observation raises the question about quantification. My rudimentary calculations suggest that maybe it isn't really a problem. Aristotle would have stopped there. Galileo would have done another experiment.
you're welcome and you bring up some interesting points that are too tedious for me to address on my phone. however, they did indeed quantity the drugs they identified.
screenshot of the NatureComm. paper:
i can provide the paper if you're interested but the platypus wasn't a facetious choice- this is an Australian study after all, and platypuses were presumably present in this aquatic environment.
Last edited by uggabugga; 11-14-2018 at 07:30 PM..
This is why we are begged to *avoid flushing pills* down the toilet etc
and to take unused meds to a facility that is prepared to destroy them.
right... but even taking unused Rx out of the equation, we are still excreting - mostly thru urination - lots of metabolically active drugs or their breakdown products which can still potentially have effects on wildlife.
right... but even taking unused Rx out of the equation, we are still excreting - mostly thru urination - lots of metabolically active drugs or their breakdown products which can still potentially have effects on wildlife.
Excellent point.
RE: quantification--really proves my point--- drugs were found in nanogram quantities- one millionth of a gram drug per gram of bug.
Even up the food web, the guys eating the bugs aren't getting anywhere near enough to make a difference, and they aren't more likely to concentrate the drugs-- they'll excrete some portion everyday too to reach a steady state level.
Venlafaxine (an antidepressant) far and away the drug in highest concentration in the insect only comes out to be present in concentrations 100x lower than the therapeutic level in humans.
Even up the food web, the guys eating the bugs aren't getting anywhere near enough to make a difference, and they aren't more likely to concentrate the drugs-- they'll excrete some portion everyday too to reach a steady state level.
Did you actually read the original publication or check their math?
Quote:
We estimate, based on platypus energetics, that a platypus consuming invertebrates from Brushy Creek would consume a total of 1154 µg kg−1 day−1 of pharmaceuticals spanning 67 compounds from 22 therapeutic drug classes. Platypus would thus consume about one-half of an average human daily dose of antidepressants by eating aquatic invertebrate prey from this stream (Fig. 4)
Keep in mind an average platypus weighs less than 5 lbs.
The "Implications and Future Directions" section also outlines the impacts these pharms have on insects, spiders, and fish. Furthermore, they noted that these drugs are making their way onto land, impacting those communities and not just the streams.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto
Venlafaxine (an antidepressant) far and away the drug in highest concentration in the insect only comes out to be present in concentrations 100x lower than the therapeutic level in humans.
A caddisfly larvae is much much smaller than 1/100 of a human. What do you think the therapeutic does of a caddisfly is?
I get it... your big thing is that we don't know yet exactly what this all means or if these numbers are "big enough" for you to care. And that's true we have more to learn. It's also probably true that bugs weren't ingesting antibiotics and muscle relaxants 100 years ago and that maybe, just maybe, they don't need them??
This problem with the math equation though is that antidepressants (and estrogen from birth control pills) stay in water and do not get filtered out. On average every bit of surface water is estimated to have been flushed through seven toilets. So when you pee in the toilet, you are adding your anti-depressants, estrogen or other substances to that of seven prior people. It builds up.
I do not know about the happy platypus study, but in some cases, they measured the level of the antidepressants and other drugs in the water supply, rather than using mathematical formulas to develop theoretical levels. Sometimes the most well meaning mathematical formulas can miss things. Nothing like real world data to set things straight.
Of course real world data is dependent on the breadth of the sampling. It is only useful if you want to know how much of substance X in is the water at a particular location. Which would be important if you needed to know why the platy was so happy. If you wanted a theoretical average of how much of a given substance is in all the water on earth, then only a mathematical formula would work, but it seems like it would be useless since it would tell you nothing about the water in a given location. Your average may be 5 because some places have 0 and other (fewer) places have 1000 but that does not really tell you anything at all.
Thus, the water in happy Platy's home may have enough antidepressant to equal to 40 adult doses but platy only ingests the equivalent of .5 doses per day because there is a lot of water there. However that is just me pondering it through and since I am a lawyer and we use words not numbers, feel free to prove me wrong.
Did you actually read the original publication or check their math?
Keep in mind an average platypus weighs less than 5 lbs.
The "Implications and Future Directions" section also outlines the impacts these pharms have on insects, spiders, and fish. Furthermore, they noted that these drugs are making their way onto land, impacting those communities and not just the streams.
A caddisfly larvae is much much smaller than 1/100 of a human. What do you think the therapeutic does of a caddisfly is?
I get it... your big thing is that we don't know yet exactly what this all means or if these numbers are "big enough" for you to care. And that's true we have more to learn. It's also probably true that bugs weren't ingesting antibiotics and muscle relaxants 100 years ago and that maybe, just maybe, they don't need them??
Re-read my initial post. Follow the calculations which are accurate at least in terms of order of magnitude. I accounted for all that, even giving them the benefit of an exaggerated concentration of the drug in the environment. Note that they totaled up ALL the drugs this platypus consumes and it's way short of my estimates---and my estimate shows that it's not problem. My calculation say the platypus would need exposures of 10^-1mg/kg to reach the level they suggest is possible for the antidepressant. Yet their data claims the exposure of all drugs together is on the order of 10^-3 mg/kg.
Also note that we have no idea what the effect of venfalaxine is on a caddis fly-- It has effects on humans because humans have receptors for the drug in their brains. I'd bet the caddis fly has none and is not affected in the least by the drug, and the platypus, a mammal, may have these receptors but may well have superior detoxifying mechanisms compared to us whimpy humans.
Again-- convince me there is a problem. Your fantasies about what might occur doesn't cut it in a scientific discussion. You have a hypothesis about damage-- now test it or show evidence that it has been tested and proven or disproven.
This problem with the math equation though is that antidepressants (and estrogen from birth control pills) stay in water and do not get filtered out. On average every bit of surface water is estimated to have been flushed through seven toilets. So when you pee in the toilet, you are adding your anti-depressants, estrogen or other substances to that of seven prior people. It builds up.
I do not know about the happy platypus study, but in some cases, they measured the level of the antidepressants and other drugs in the water supply, rather than using mathematical formulas to develop theoretical levels. Sometimes the most well meaning mathematical formulas can miss things. Nothing like real world data to set things straight.
Of course real world data is dependent on the breadth of the sampling. It is only useful if you want to know how much of substance X in is the water at a particular location. Which would be important if you needed to know why the platy was so happy. If you wanted a theoretical average of how much of a given substance is in all the water on earth, then only a mathematical formula would work, but it seems like it would be useless since it would tell you nothing about the water in a given location. Your average may be 5 because some places have 0 and other (fewer) places have 1000 but that does not really tell you anything at all.
Thus, the water in happy Platy's home may have enough antidepressant to equal to 40 adult doses but platy only ingests the equivalent of .5 doses per day because there is a lot of water there. However that is just me pondering it through and since I am a lawyer and we use words not numbers, feel free to prove me wrong.
You bring up some excellent points.
I have to question the water source they were measuring. Let's say there's 4 people living in each house and that 1 in 10 houses have a person on a given drug. If you ever needed to calculate water needs for a new house or well, you'd know that the general rule is each person uses 30 gal/d--- so 4 people per house x 10 houses x 30gal/person comes out to 1200 gal per day going down the drain for every 10 houses-- with one stinking pill mixed in the 1200 gal of water...problem anticipated??? .. We won't even bring up the fact that the 1200 gal is further diluted in whatever reservoir it's mixed with.
BTW- drugs don't get concentrated in the reservoirs. They are organic molecules and are more or less quickly metabolized by bacteria, degraded by sun light or oxidized & hydrolyzed by inorganic reactions. {Cf- glyphosate, an organic molecule, is a favored herbicide because it is degraded so quickly in the environment.}
If that study found high concentrations of drugs, then there's something wrong with their water treatment system, not with the way drugs are dealt with.
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