Science From Away

Science from Away: This and That: One, Two and Three.

            One -When something about the environment appears in Chemical and Engineering News, the trade magazine of the American Chemical Society, and also gets a segment on the McNeil-Lehr News-Hour on public television, the most respected news source in the USA, you can figure this is potentially serious. It turns out that traces of the pharmaceuticals we use to treat our various maladies, both physical and mental, end up in our water supplies. The amounts are minute, in the level of parts per trillion, that is, in a gross approximation, for every trillion water molecules there may be several molecules of each kind of drug.  Sounds like not much but I gave the problem to my high school-age going daughter who figured out that this amounts to approximately several drug molecules in every 8×10^-10 ounces of water, which is 0.0000000008 ounces of water or anything made of water such as beer, or you name it. What drugs are they talking about: 17α-ethinylestradiol (birth control); carbamazepine (anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer); diclofenac (analgesic directed to reducing pain from arthritis and menstrual cramps); fluoxetine (Prozac, which is an antidepressant or mood elevator), are only a few of many examples of what has been found.

            Well, why worry about such small amounts until, among other scientists, Karen Kidd, a professor at the Canadian Rivers Institute at the University of New Brunswick, started conducting experiments on what minute amounts of one of the drugs listed above, the birth control drug, do to fish. Apparently male fathead minnows become feminized and, in a manner of speaking, lose interest in female fish and even start producing eggs themselves and, over a short period of time, the fish all but disappeared from a lake with a concentration of the 17α-ethinylestradiol in the range of a few parts per trillion. This is only one example among many species, other than fish, gathered by scientists increasingly interested in this area of research.

            It turns out that science knows almost nothing about the effect of such small amounts of drugs on human beings. Some, but not I, may be reassured by the words of a senior vice president with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Ken Johnson, quoted in a balanced article on the subject in the February 25, 2008 issue of Chemical and Engineering News: “Studies conducted to date suggest that it is highly unlikely that the quantities of pharmaceuticals detected in the environment would be harmful to human health.”  While this view may not be justified, you can’t blame the drug industry for the problem. The stuff gets in the water after passing through our bodies or when we carelessly discard the contents of old bottles of drugs in the toilet or down the drain.

            The connection to what has been called “drug pollution,” has an interesting connection to homeopathic medicine, in which physiologically active substances are diluted so that a patient gets only minute amounts, which are then claimed to affect bodily functions and disease. I typed in Homeopathy on Google and got 5, 890, 000 hits with claims ranging from calling homeopathy complete nonsense to claims that it is a unique and revolutionary alternative medicine. My wife strongly believes in it as do a significant percentage of MDs in Europe. If the homeopathic method of using microdoses is actually efficacious, then we certainly should begin to worry about all the physiologically active substances increasingly found in our water supplies at concentrations similar to homeopathic drugs.

            Two - Let’s now turn to a more cheerful subject - how to be healthy. According to research at the University of Michigan, if both people in a married couple suppress their anger, even if they are angry for justifiable reasons, their mortality rate is far higher than people who do not, as we say, bottle it up. Another researcher is quoted in the February 1, 2008 issue of Science magazine as saying: “the data add weight to the growing evidence that poor emotional housecleaning has health consequences in marriage.” This view is reinforced by a web headline from a research finding published in Science in December, 2005: “Love is an Open Wound,” expressing the research finding that physical injuries of the couples in unhappy marriages take longer to heal.  I remember many years ago, around the time I proposed marriage, hearing that married men lived longer. I didn’t realize the chance I was taking in not being able to know ahead of time how happy my marriage had to be.

            Three - Now how about a little politics: in work that is highly regarded by public policy experts, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University after gathering data on 15,000 college students has concluded that self-described liberals and conservatives although measuring identically on grades and other characteristics of their studies, nevertheless differ in one key measure. While the conservative leaning students “are more oriented toward raising families and making money,” the liberal leaning students were far more likely to pursue Ph.D. degrees with the claim that liberals “placed higher values on creativity.” I wonder what Bill Gates’ politics are? He dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen.