Posted by Larry Hoover on April 16, 2005, at 18:38:18
In reply to Re: really that was a hoax ?, posted by linkadge on April 16, 2005, at 17:43:51
> It is concievable. Was birth controll pills in the water a hoax too ??
>
> LinkadgeYes, the Prozac thing was a complete hoax.
http://www.dwi.gov.uk/pressrel/2004/pr0304.shtm
Here's the link to the original scientific report, but it's not opening correctly for me, right now. The link is active, it's just not opening.
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/commondata/105385/p601206trv2_578719.pdf
First off, our own bodies near totally degrade Prozac before excretion. There is very little entering sewage treatment plants, but none leaves. It's all broken down, or bound in the sediment that is precipitated out in a process that is called flocculation. However, birth control hormones do persist in the environment. Here's why.
The normal half-life of natural estrogen in a woman's body is about 90 seconds. It's constantly created and consumed. In order to develop a pill that could be taken once a day, rather than every 90 seconds (heh), they changed the molecule around so that it doesn't fit the destructive liver enzyme any more, but it still agonizes the estrogen receptors in the reproductive tract. The result was a long-lasting estrogen analog, which is gradually lost in urine.
The problem is that this synthetic estrogen doesn't fit into the enzymes Mother Nature gave bacteria, either. Sewage treatment plants are really bacterial digesters....all the equipment is designed to maximize the metabolic activity of bacteria. Some stuff, though, even the bacteria can't turn into food.
Synthetic birth control hormones enter the receiving water below sewage treatment plants unchanged. So does most of the tylenol you take, as another example.
There is a big problem with xenoestrogens (literally, estrogens from outside), and other endocrine disrupting chemicals, persisting in the environment. We know of thousands of different ones. DDT is an estrogenic chemical. Even worse is the metabolite of DDT, called DDE. That's what nearly killed off all the eagles twenty years ago. The DDT and DDE clogged the estrogen-dependent calcium pumps that created the egg shells. Fertile eggs were laid, but the shells were too weak, and could not be incubated without crushing them.
Your clothes detergents are different today than they were ten years ago, in part because of work I assisted on. Nonylphenol polyethoxylates were replaced by other detergents; NPEs are estrogenic. We caused male fish to grow ova in their testes, in the laboratory, at 50-100 ppb NPE, similar to levels found in waters near sewage outflows. They've only just now been banned in Britain.
We, at first, thought that these detergent chemicals were responsible for the feminization of fish in waterways receiving treated sewage, but then someone thought to actually check for hormones themselves. Lo and behold, there they were.
Anyway, it's been a few years since I worked on this stuff....but just two days ago I saw another of my old interests, in the news again....bisphenol-A, a component of polycarbonate plastics (hard water bottles), food can lacquers (to keep food from tasting tinny), plastic tooth repair cements (so-called "white fillings"), and others. Exposure to bisphenol-A was just shown to cause attention deficit and hyperactivity following in utero exposures. It's also an endocrine-disrupting chemical with estrogenic binding affinities.
Makes you think. One man's sewage is the next man's drinking water. There's no Prozac in it though. Caffeine, yes. Prozac, no.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:484614
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050413/msgs/485224.html