This week, the sprogs came home from school with the annual read-the-local-paper- and-complete-activities -for-free-stuff- from-local-merchants assignments. While this program has the unfortunate effect of doubling the amount of newspaper spread out on the living room floor, I think it’s a generally good idea to get kids reading the newspaper on a regular basis. Some of the stories they read there, however, can make them anxious.
Elder offspring: I’m going to read this article on what’s happening to fish because of drugs in the water they live in.
Dr. Free-Ride: Good choice. I’ve been listening to reporting on that story on the radio this week.
Elder offspring: It says that some of the male fish have become “feminized” — they’re making egg proteins — or don’t have very many sperm. And that some of the female fish grew male sex organs.
Dr. Free-Ride: Mmm-hmm.
Elder offspring: And bass that produce sperm and eggs — in the same fish.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yikes!
Elder offspring: It’s kind of cool, but also kind of scary. That probably isn’t good for the fish populations, is it?
Dr. Free-Ride: I’m guessing it’s not.
Elder offspring: So why are there drugs in the water where the fish are? Who would put them there?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I don’t think this is from people emptying their pill bottles into lakes and rivers and streams. I think this is from medicines people have taken.
Elder offspring: Huh?
Dr. Free-Ride: It’s the drug compounds that they pee out.
Elder offspring: Yuck!
Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, bodies have a system for moving out the waste. You wouldn’t necessarily want those drug compounds sitting around in your body forever.
Elder offspring: OK, so they get peed out. But how does that end up in the lakes and rivers?
Dr. Free-Ride: The waste-water gets treated and pumped back into waterways — and used as drinking water, by the way.
Elder offspring: Oh no!
Dr. Free-Ride: Oh yes. I guess our water supply hadn’t really been tested until recently for the small amounts of drug compounds that they’re talking about in that article. People didn’t realize they were there, and the waste-water treatment isn’t really set up to take them out of the water that’s being treated.
Elder offspring: What about the Brita?
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t think its filter was designed with pharmaceutical compounds in mind, either.
Elder offspring: I don’t want to drink water any more!
Dr. Free-Ride: Kid, your body needs water to function.
Elder offspring: I’ll just drink milk.
Dr. Free-Ride: You think these drugs aren’t in the water the cows are drinking?
Elder offspring: Oh no!
Dr. Free-Ride: OK, don’t panic. Part of why we know about these compounds in the water now is that the testing has gotten a lot more sensitive recently. Now that we know they’re in the water, scientists can try to figure out what kinds of effects they might have on human health and also good ways to try to get them out of our water.
Elder offspring: Won’t that take awhile?
Dr. Free-Ride: Sure. But you’re young, and there have probably been these small amounts of drugs in our water supply for a long time, whether we knew it or not. Probably my whole life — so chances are good that they’ll figure this out well before you’re my age.
Elder offspring: I hope so.
Dr. Free-Ride: You’ve got time on your side, and even your old mother seems to be in pretty good shape.
Elder offspring: But I don’t want you to develop male sex organs!
Dr. Free-Ride: Eh, I’m done having children. How bad could it be?
When I lived in CO, we used to go up to the headwaters of the Colorado River and wade in the creek/river so my kids could tell their grandparents that they had played in the grandparents’ drinking water.
It’s good to live close to your drinking water source.
Cool! One of my colleagues, the crack investigative reporter who sits two cubicles down from me, wrote that story.
Your sprog blog posts always make me wish more parents were scientists.
Oh, but I couldn’t help thinking at the end of that dialog: if you did, it would at least help set Vox Day’s mind at rest. >;)
Brilliant story
I don’t know if you’ve seen this already, but Skeptico has a brilliant spoof of this story, “Homeopathic Drugs found in US Drinking Water”: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/03/homeopathic-dru.html
And we thought YOU weren’t listening when we went to water management and zoning issue talks.
The environmental effects have been a cause for worry for a while, so it’s nice to see this getting more attention.
See, for example:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020629/bob7.asp
…In particular, I wonder about the effect of antibiotics fed to livestock; will any of these drugs contribute to the growth of resistant bacteria?
Elder Sprog,
Every thing can be poisonous, if you swallow enough of it. You just need to be careful about how much of anything you swallow. Water you can have any time you get thirsty, but not gallons at a time. Grain alcohol? Only on very special occasions, in real tiny amounts, and with adult supervision. At your age a sip of wine is only for stupendously important events.
As for fish turning into the other sex. Some species of fish do this when males get scarce, or even disappear in the local environment. When this happens the larger lady fish turn into guys. They can do this because fish don’t handle gender the way mammals do.
But, it is possible for people to partially change gender, if things happen just right. There’s a lady I know, who used to be a guy I knew. Before he was born his mother was given a drug thought to be effective at preventing miscarriages and premature births. It wasn’t. What it did no was feminize him a bit. So he lived his life up until 2005 as a man, with some odd feelings.
Then his doctor put him on a statin (Lipitor) for high cholesterol. His cholesterol dropped, his testes stopped producing testosterone, and the fat keeping his estrogen (yes, guys produce estrogen too) sequestered went away. He got hit by a massive jolt of estrogen and other feminizing hormones, which started her on an interesting journey. With the parent critters’ help you can ask Zoe about it, and learn about intersexed and transexual subjects from somebody who has first hand experience with both.
You? The odds are you are most definitely a girl, and you’ll be a girl until the day you die, a scandal to your grandchildren. What sort of woman you grow into no one can say, but I’ll bet you’ll be a lot like your mom, with a touch of your dad. Whatever you do as an adult, do your best and take pride in whatever you do.
That’s enough of me being all deep and stuff. For now take every chance you get to be curious, inquisitive, and even nosy.
All the more reason to buy from and support organic farmers in every way possible!
Ask those women with 5ARD or 17BHDD who this has happened to.
Plenty bad. Trust me on this.
It didn’t happen to me, but something equally weird did.