Soap, sunscreen and steroids found in Antarctic waters and wildlife

Range of pharmaceuticals found in fish, clams and sea urchins in waters around two research stations, says New Zealand researchers

Australian Associated Press

theguardian.com, Tuesday 2 December 2014 23.06 GMT

The last great wilderness on Earth now has traces of personal care products and steroid hormones.

New Zealand scientists have said the waters around two Antarctic research stations have evidence of the active ingredients found in soaps, fragrances, sunscreens and lotions.

Researchers from the University of Canterbury and Northcott Research Consultants studied the levels of pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs, around New Zealand’s Scott Base and the US facility McMurdo Station.

They found the active ingredients were present up to 25km from where sewage was discharged into the sea from treatment plants.

And they found traces of PPCPs in clams, fish and sea urchins collected from around the bases.

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Drugs flushed into the environment could be cause of wildlife decline

New studies show antidepressants causing starlings to feed less and contraceptive drugs reducing fish populations in lakes

Damian Carrington

The Guardian, Monday 13 October 2014

Potent pharmaceuticals flushed into the environment via human and animal sewage could be a hidden cause of the global wildlife crisis, according to new research. The scientists warn that worldwide use of the drugs, which are designed to be biologically active at low concentrations, is rising rapidly but that too little is currently known about their effect on the natural world.

Studies of the effect of pharmaceutical contamination on wildlife are rare but new work published on Monday reveals that an anti-depressant reduces feeding in starlings and that a contraceptive drug slashes fish populations in lakes.

“With thousands of pharmaceuticals in use globally, they have the potential to have potent effects on wildlife and ecosystems,” said Kathryn Arnold, at the University of York, who edited a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. ”Given the many benefits of pharmaceuticals, there is a need for science to deliver better estimates of the environmental risks they pose.”

She said: “Given that populations of many species living in human-altered landscapes are declining for reasons that cannot be fully explained, we believe that it is time to explore emerging challenges,” such as pharmaceutical pollution.

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Fish flourish on anxiety drug

Pharmaceutical pollutants in water seem to benefit at least one species — effects that could be missed by standard risk assessments.

Simon Makin

08 August 2014

Studies of the impact of pharmaceuticals on fish such as the English perch may have overlooked positive effects, researchers claim.

Fish that have been exposed to a common anti-anxiety drug are more active and have better chances of survival than unexposed fish, researchers report in Environmental Research Letters1. The results suggest that standard methods for assessing the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals in waterways might miss some of the drugs' effects because they focus exclusively on harms, according to the authors.

In the study, researchers led by Jonatan Klaminder at Umeå University in Sweden exposed Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis) to oxazepam, one of a widely used class of anti-anxiety drugs called benzodiazepines.

Standard ecotoxicology experiments use unstressed, healthy fish that have been bred in labs. Control groups are designed to have 100% survival rates so that decreases in survival in the test group are easy to detect by comparison. But it is difficult to detect any increase in survival rates when the control group already has nearly complete survival.

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