Make you Fink on Friday

Prozac may be harming bird populations, study suggests

Starlings who were fed same levels of antidepressant drug found in sewage earthworms suffered loss of libido and appetite

Starlings tend to flock to feed at sewage works, where they feed on worms with low levels of Prozac from human waste. Photograph: SIGI TISCHLER/EPA

Increasing consumption of antidepressant drugs may be helping humans but damaging the health of the bird population, according to a new study.

An expert who has looked at the effects of passive Prozac-taking on starlings says it has changed not only their feeding habits but also their interest in mating.

Dr Kathryn Arnold, an ecologist from the University of York, said: “Females who’d been on it were not interested in the male birds we introduced them to. They sat in the middle of the cage, not interested at all.”

Arnold’s research, which is investigated on BBC2’s Autumnwatch, took her to sewage works where birds flock to feed.

“They’re a really great place to watch birds because they’re attracted by all the worms and invertebrates that live there,” she told Radio Times.

“I started thinking, ‘What about what’s in the sewage?’ If you or I take a headache pill for instance, a high proportion of it ends up being excreted completely unchanged.”

She measured the level of Prozac present in earthworms living in sewage. It was tiny, around 3-5% of the average human dosage.

She then fed worms containing the same concentration of the drug to 24 captive starlings and monitored their behaviour over six months.

The birds began to display side effects similar to those reported by humans prescribed Prozac.

“The major finding was a loss of appetite. Compared with the control birds who hadn’t had any Prozac, they ate much less and snacked throughout the day. The problem then is that they’re less likely to survive long, dark winter’s nights.”

It was not just food that lost its appeal – the birds’ libido also fell.

However, in one significant area, the starlings’ reaction to the drug did not mimic its effect on the human brain – their mood remained unchanged.

Arnold said: “Antidepressants reduce anxiety in humans but we can’t ask a bird if it’s anxious; we have to measure it in a behavioural way. We present them with an unfamiliar object and see how they react. If a bird is bold, it’ll carry on feeding, even though there’s something strange in its food bowl. But we found no effect on boldness, which is what we’d expected.

“Maybe we were measuring it the wrong way and that wasn’t a particularly stressful task. If we repeated it, we’d use a different method or different novel object. Or it could be that there are enough variations between bird and human brains that Prozac works in a slightly different way.”

Autumnwatch presenter Chris Packham said there may be no simple answer. He said: “This change in behaviour could impact negatively on their ecology. We know for instance we’ve lost 50 million starlings in the UK since the 1960s.

“Pharmaceuticals could play a part. The next stage of the work is to look at wild starlings to check if they also have chemical residue in their bodies.”

Arnold said she was not attacking antidepressants or the waste-disposal industry. “I’m not saying that if you’re depressed, don’t take Prozac. Sewage treatment works are really good sources of food for birds. We’re certainly not saying they should be covered over.

“Science needs to deliver better estimates of the environmental risks posed by pharmaceuticals. The effects we’ve measured so far are quite subtle.

“These aren’t big die-offs but they could have a negative impact on wildlife. We need to find out whether they are. It’s going to get worse so we need to get a handle on it.”

Source: TheGuardian

Opinion:

Once again, an example of whatever man does, has an effect on the natural balance.

Monday Moaning

China has the biggest footprint in Asia, while this post targets China, it is aimed at the whole Asian region, from India to Japan.

Apart from China’s political policy and human rights abuses China faces massive problems.

I am quite comfortable in saying that I would never consider knowingly buying any foodstuff from China or any region in Asia.

The problem is how to identify.

Panga, a fish from Vietnam is no problem, the supermarkets are full of the shit.

But when you consider that 34% of mushrooms in America come from China, you may not buy them, but what about the restaurants that use them. Then there is 16% of frozen spinach, 27% of garlic, 49% of apple juice, the list goes on. It’s hard to identify.

When you read statistics like these:

:: A fifth of China’s land is polluted. The FAO/OECD report gingerly calls this problem the “declining trend in soil quality.” Fully 40 percent of China’s arable land has been degraded by some combination of erosion, salinization, or acidification — and nearly 20 percent is polluted, whether by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff, the FAO/OECD report found.

:: China considers its soil problems “state secrets.” The Chinese government conducted a national survey of soil pollution in 2006, but it has refused to release the results. But evidence is building that soil toxicity is a major problem that’s creeping into the food supply. In May 2013, food safety officials in the southern city of Guangzhou found heightened levels of cadmium, a carcinogenic heavy metal, in 8 of 18 rice samples picked up at local restaurants, sparking a national furor. The rice came from Hunan province — where “expanding factories, smelters and mines jostle with paddy fields,” the New York Times reported. In 2011, Nanjing Agricultural University researchers came out with a report claiming they had found cadmium in 10 percent of rice samples nationwide and 60 percent of samples from southern China.

:: China’s food system is powered by coal. It’s not just industry that’s degrading the water and land China relies on for food. It’s also agriculture itself. China’s food production miracle has been driven by an ever-increasing annual cascade of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (it now uses more than a third of global nitrogen output) — and its nitrogen industry relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy needs. To grow its food, in other words, China relies on an energy source that competes aggressively with farming for water.

:: Five of China’s largest lakes have substantial dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff. That’s what a paper by Chinese and University of California researchers found after they examined Chinese lakes in 2008. And heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer takes its toll on soil quality, too. It causes pH levels to drop, turning soil acidic and less productive — a problem rampant in China. Here’s a 2010 Nature article on a national survey of the nation’s farmland:

Go and read these statistics: Grist

Read about another side of this sad problem: Not even good enough for dog food: Imported food from China loaded with chemicals, dyes, pesticides and fake ingredients.

It gets worse:

Read more

Nearly 20 million people in China could be exposed to water contaminated with arsenic, a study suggests.

Scientists used information about the geology of the country to predict the areas most likely to be affected by the poison.

The report is published in the journal Science.

Arsenic occurs naturally in the Earth’s crust, but if it leaches into groundwater, long-term exposure can cause serious health risks.

These include skin problems and cancers of the skin, lungs, bladder and kidney.

Which means this is the water also used for agriculture, food products for export. Their arsenic is ending is ending up in our food chain.

Governments are bending over backwards to do business with Asia, particularly China.

Even Japan now has a major problem with radioactive contaminants.

They should be legislating to BAN Asian food products from the shelves of the western world.

Especially in China’s case, they are exporting mainly poison and cancers!

Make you Fink on Friday

Monday Moaning

We’ve screwed up big time!

Drugs, chemicals, additives to food, cosmetics and medicines are all fine when they go ‘in’, but what happens when they go ‘out’?

Anxiety drug found in rivers changes fish behaviour

Normally shy perch became bolder and more independent when exposed to a drug called oxazepam for treating anxiety

The effect of the drug on European perch (above) was similar to its effect on people, with potential evolutionary and ecological impacts. Photograph: Alamy

Drugs to treat anxiety in people may alter the behaviour of fish when the chemicals are flushed into rivers, according to scientists. Swedish researchers found that European perch exposed to tiny concentrations of a drug became less sociable, ate more and became more adventurous – all changes in behaviour that could have unexpected ecological impacts on fish populations.

When scientists at Umeå University in Sweden screened rivers for pharmaceuticals they found that a drug for treating anxiety, called oxazepam, was accumulating in fish. Many drugs and other synthetic chemicals used by humans in everything from pesticides to cosmetics can pass through waste water treatment and end up in wildlife, potentially accumulating to toxic levels.

But until now scientists had never studied the behavioural impacts of small quantities of contaminants. Tomas Brodin led a team that mimicked in the lab the concentrations of oxazepam found in the wild – around a microgram per kilogram of fish body weight – and watched for changes in how bold, sociable and active the fish were.

“Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools,” said Brodin. “This is a known strategy for survival and growth. But those who swim in oxazepam became considerably bolder.”

The results are published this week in Science and were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Jonatan Klaminder, an ecologist at Umeå University and an author of the paper, said the effect of the drug on fish was similar to its effect on people. “What the drug does is remove some of the fear that the very small fish experience,” he said. “[They] become less interested in staying close with others – staying close to others is a well-known defence system to avoid predators. They become less afraid of exploring new areas, so they just go out to search for food and become more effective in finding and consuming food.”

This change in behaviour could have evolutionary consequences. Adventurous or antisocial fish are more likely to be eaten by larger fishes but are also the ones that will explore new areas and, over time, alter the genetic diversity of future populations.

The solution, according to the researchers, is not to stop medicating people who need drugs such as oxazepam but to improve sewage treatment plants to capture the drugs and reduce their contamination of water systems in the wild.

The research also has implications for the way ecologists monitor pollutants in the environment, said Klaminder. “We’re still deeply rooted in what a pollutant is and it goes back to the 1970s and 1980s where we had heavy rain, acid rain, organic pollutants that definitely cause harm and physiological effects. When it comes to drugs, there is a new area of contamination research that doesn’t really fit with this old conceptual view.” Focusing on the potential negative physiological impacts of an environmental contaminant could miss the subtle behavioural changes that may also occur.

He added: “Hopefully it will make researchers rethink what they are looking for.”

Check the links here

Opinion:

How much of this drug is being passed on to humans? Will we too become emboldened, will our behaviours change? Have our behaviours already changed?

What goes in, must comes out… and not all of it is treated; as a result we are polluting the waterways of the world worse than we thought.

Every time you pee or crap, the chemicals that you have used/consumed are passing directly into the planetary water system.

So you may think you are buying or eating organic, but the reality is that your precious organic products are tainted and poisoned by the very water that you think makes them organic.

What other chemicals are we passing on to people through the food chain?

Just think, every time you clean your face after you’ve used makeup, the gunk goes down the drain… and into the sewerage system… Is it treated, or does it just pass right on into the rivers and estuaries? We already know that many cosmetic products have harmful chemicals.

We’ve screwed up big time!