ANTI-DEPRESANTS LEACHING INTO WATER SUPPLIES MAKE WILDLIFE SICK AND EVEN KILLS THEM - Otters with liver damage, starlings dying - Birth control pill ingredients causing severe hormonal disorders in fish

Are happy pills destroying our wildlife? Starlings dying. Otters with liver damage. Cuttlefish driven crazy. How anti-depressants leaching into water supplies are wreaking havoc.

Starlings lose interest in food and sex after being exposed to Prozac 

And crayfish become more aggressive when exposed to the 'happy pills'

As many as one in six people in the UK take anti-depressants

While anti-inflammatory drugs are causing severe liver damage in otters

They are reckless, feckless, sexually useless and easy meat for predators. They are even at risk of liver damage.

 

No, not a new generation of drink and drug-addled youths. This is the wildlife of Britain, creatures whose brains and bodies are being sent haywire by the torrents of antidepressants, contraceptive pills and painkillers that we flush with our urine into the waterways every year.

 

The victims include starlings, otters, cuttlefish and crayfish. But scientists fear these animals represent only a few of the UK species being threatened by our pill-popping habits.

 

This week, a BBC documentary will highlight the plight of our starling population. Its investigators’ experiments indicate that the birds are dramatically losing interest in food and sex after being exposed to Prozac in the food chain.

 

Long-term monitoring by the British Trust For Ornithology shows starling numbers have fallen by two-thirds in Britain since the early Eighties. The RSPB says the starling is now listed as a ‘bird of high conservation concern’.

 

While the charity admits the cause of the decline in the UK is not clear, Dr Kathryn Arnold, an ecologist from the University of York, who has been studying the effects of our Prozac habit on starlings, suggests the anti-depressant could be partly to blame.

 

She says the birds are ingesting fluoxetine — the drug’s active ingredient — by eating earthworms that thrive at sewage works.

 

The level of fluoxetine in these worms is tiny, around four per cent of the equivalent average dose given to humans. But research shows even this minute dose can have a profound effect on the starlings’ brains.

 

Dr Arnold fed worms containing the same concentration of the drug to 24 captive starlings and monitored their behaviour over six months.

 

The experiment, on BBC2’s Autumnwatch, which is broadcast over four days this week, found that the birds suffered side-effects similar to those experienced by humans taking Prozac.

 

‘The major finding was loss of appetite,’ she says. ‘Compared with the control birds who hadn’t had any Prozac, they ate much less and snacked throughout the day. The problem then is that they’re less likely to survive long, dark winter’s nights.’

 

The birds’ libido also plummeted. ‘Females who’d been on it were not interested in the male birds we introduced them to,’ says Dr Arnold. There was no evidence, however, that the birds became any happier or less anxious on the drug.

 

‘The effects we’ve measured so far are quite subtle,’ she says. ‘But they could have a negative impact on wildlife. We need to find out. Their exposure to antidepressants is only going to get worse, so we need to get a handle on it.’

 

More than 50 million prescriptions for anti-depressants are issued in the UK every year, with as many as one in six people taking them.

 

The actual concentrations of these drugs in our waters is minuscule — as low as one part per million parts of water. But scientists are finding that even these tiny amounts can cause perilous alterations in wild creatures’ behaviour.

 

While exposure to Prozac-type antidepressants failed to make starlings appear less anxious, the drugs do have this effect on creatures such as crayfish — which become dangerously bold. Tests on a group of males showed they become much more aggressive, engage in long, injurious fights and kill large numbers of females.

 

Cuttlefish, too, become confused by our ‘happy pills’. In April, the journal Aquatic Toxicology reported how, in one experiment, a shrimp was placed in a test-tube lowered into a tank with cuttlefish.

 

Cuttlefish not exposed to the drugs soon give up on the unobtainable treat.

 

But those exposed to the anti-depressant in their water continuously slammed into the tube, wasting energy and endangering themselves. Most anti-depressants are believed to work by boosting levels of the ‘feel-good’ chemical serotonin in the brain.

 

Many wild creatures also produce serotonin, which not only affects their brains but also numerous physical mechanisms, such as the ability to produce pigments.

 

When cuttlefish are exposed to Prozac, their ability to produce skin camouflage to match their surroundings is seriously impaired, the journal reported. So, not only are the antidepressant-addled cuttlefish now recklessly bold, they also look glaringly obvious to predators.

 

Something similar happens to the English perch. Scientists at Umeå University in Sweden found that a drug for treating anxiety, called oxazepam, is accumulating in the fish.

 

Fish exposed in water containing tiny concentrations of the drug (around a microgram per kilogram of fish body weight) become less sociable, more adventurous and eat more, investigators reported in the journal Science.

 

‘Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools,’ says professor Tomas Brodin, the environmental scientist who led the study. ‘But those which swim in oxazepam became considerably bolder. Adventurous or antisocial fish are more likely to swim off alone and be eaten by larger fish.’

 

Another popular type of antidepressant is sending fathead minnows haywire. Their low place in the food chain means they are normally timid. But when the silver-pink fresh-water fish are exposed in experiments to the antidepressant Zoloft in their water, they develop a false sense of security. 

 

Instead of hiding in dark nooks when it’s light, they stay in the open, unconcerned. The very low levels of Zoloft to which they were exposed in the experiments are the same as those now found in their natural environments.

 

Prawns and shrimps around Britain are likewise getting dangerously high on anti-depressants, according to studies performed by Dr Alex Ford, a marine biologist at Portsmouth University.

The creatures are five times more likely to swim up to light when exposed to Prozac-type drugs, tests have revealed.

 

This puts the mud-loving crustaceans at greater risk of being eaten by fish or birds which could have a devastating effect on their numbers, says Dr Ford, adding that this could perilously disrupt our entire coastal food chain.

 

As if our addiction to happy pills is not enough to contend with, wildlife are also suffering because of other pills we take.

 

It’s well known that hormones from the Pill can cause fish to change sex — a third of male fish in English rivers had developed female characteristics, researchers found in 2004.

 

But the effects of the Pill go much wider. Starlings have been found to be vulnerable to the effects of minute doses. Newly- hatched birds exposed to the synthetic female hormones in the Pill grow more slowly and have weak immune systems, according to a study in the Journal Of Applied Ecology.

 

This pharmaceutical exposure to wildlife is growing as prescriptions for drugs continue to rise, and the levels of their contamination in the environment are increasing steadily.

 

A quarter of the nation’s women aged between 16 and 49 are on the Pill, and large amounts of the ingredients in these drugs pass through our bodies unchanged.

 

Painkillers excreted into the water supply are potentially lethal, too. Again these are at low levels in human terms. For example, the drugs can be detected in tap water, but you would need to drink ten to 20 million litres to absorb enough medication to fix a headache.

 

But wild animals are much more prone to being damaged by the chemicals. An ongoing study of otters in British rivers indicates that two commonly used nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (or NSAIDs)— diclofenac and ibuprofen — are causing severe liver damage to the mammals.

 

The creatures were collected from six counties in England as part of an otter-health monitoring project at the Wildlife Veterinary Investigation Centre in Chacewater, Cornwall.

 

Disturbing post-mortem evidence suggests the otters are highly prone to liver damage caused by tiny amounts of the painkillers. In humans, this kind of liver damage is only seen as a very rare side-effect of chronic overuse of the pills.

 

As Dr Ford warns: ‘Wildlife can be affected by exceedingly small amounts, as little as one nanogram per litre — the equivalent of dropping a few grains of the compound into an Olympic-size swimming pool.’

 

In future, he adds, scientists may reveal even more problems, as they start to investigate the effects of other drugs on wild creatures.

 

The tragic outcome of our quest for chemically-assisted happiness, it seems, is that the natural world is fast becoming a much grimmer place.
 

Source

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2808929/Are-happy-pills-destroying-wildlife.html

More articles on otters on this blog
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/search/label/Animals%20-%20Otters

 

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