Here is more, enjoy!<g>. The positive side for this is maybe, just maybe, one day guys can get pregnant, LOL--"Conference tackles pharmaceutical water pollution"
By GREG HARMAN
BILOXI - Fish and frogs are changing sexes. Male alligators aren't developing working reproductive organs. And expectant mothers are more likely than ever to welcome a Geraldine into the world rather than a Gerald, as average sperm counts decline worldwide.
"It's a conspiracy!" cracked one conference attendee sitting in on a session dealing with pharmaceutical pollution of water supplies, a special topic of this week's National Rural Water Association conference in Biloxi.
The culprit of this gender-bending mayhem is thought to be the chemical revolution of the last century.
Scientists are discovering that a wide range of chemicals - including pesticides, hormone therapy drugs, psychiatric drugs, steroids, flame retardant and cosmetics - all share troubling properties.
Known as endocrine disrupters, the chemicals in these drugs slip unregulated through drinking water treatment plants and out of faucets around the country. They are expected to be the next major regulatory challenge for wastewater operators.
"It's not so much things that cause cancer at high exposures. They're not the things that kill you," Jerry Biberstine, an environmental engineer for the NRWA, told audiences. "It's things that change you in a very slow way from what you should be."
Endocrine disrupters affect the endocrine system, a complex system of glands and organs that secrete hormones into the human body to regulate reproduction and development. These include the thyroid, pancreas, pituitary, ovaries, testes and adrenal glands.
In South Mississippi, the problem first came to light in a Sun Herald article about Moss Point student Anna Jordan, who took on the issue as part of her senior year research project in 2003 at Mercy Cross High School. With the help of wastewater officials in Jackson and Harrison counties, she found caffeine and estrogen in the treated wastewater of 100 percent of the samples collected.
But the risks are still far from clear.
After all, pesticides are thought to be the No. 1 source of endocrine disrupters. About 80 percent of adults and 90 percent of children in the U.S. test positive for pesticides, Biberstine said. But such contact may be made through the air and food supply, as well as water.
Federal drinking water standards for one of the most problematic disrupters, atrazine, is 30 parts per billion, though developmental changes have been recorded in frogs as low as .2 ppb.
And though a clearer understanding of the risks - and the ability of treatment plants to deal with the problem - is likely years away, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, Biberstine said.
"In looking at the data, you have some really severe health effects," he said. "This is a thing that's so important it could drive a change in the whole wastewater industry... It's going to impact almost everything we know in one way or another."
Kamran Pahlavan, executive director of the Harrison County Wastewater District, said the treatment plant does not test for chemicals like atrazine in its discharge since the EPA does not regulate it. But he said there have been inquiries by the agency for samples to test for radioactive waste entering from area hospitals.
That wave of regulation is coming, he said. "You're right. The pharmaceutical is next."
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