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Contents 1 Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products-A potential threat? 1.1 Among the concerns: 1.2 Uncertainty remains: 1.3 Detection costs are high 1.4 Limited studies 1.5 Related Links

Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products-A potential threat?

By Yu-Ting Lin

Every day, drugs, perfumes, caffeine, shampoos, soaps and lotions are sent from households to sewage treatment plants never designed to monitor or remove them.

Some of these products, like expired medicines, are dumped directly down the drain. Others, like the residue of birth control pills and other medicines, are excreted during urination.

What happens next has some researchers worried about a newly recognized class of potentially health threatening substances that include antibiotics, steroids, antidepressants and hormones.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls these substances Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products or PPCPs. They could exist in every sewage system, aquatic ecosystem and perhaps livestock and plants in any civilized country.

The area that drains the Red Cedar River in Michigan has seven sewage treatment plants. There are 623 in Michigan. Each is a potential source of what is regarded by some as an emerging contaminant.

And no government agency regulates them.

Among the concerns:

• A 1999-2000 study by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that bacteria in the environment exposed to very low levels of antibiotics become resistant to them. That can make it harder for people to fight disease.

• Some fish and wildlife detected with these biochemical compounds have reproductive and immune problems. Studies in the United Kingdom and Germany have found high levels of hormones disturb the reproduction of fish. Male fish developed female characteristics like producing chemicals for egg yolks instead of sperm.

• Researchers in Florida have found young male alligators being feminized due to high concentrations of hormones found in lakes. Their penises have decreased 25 percent in size and their sperm is less active and in lower quantity.

• Whether there are similar effects in humans is as yet unknown.

“PPCPs would likely affect wildlife more than humans,” said Tom Mort, water pollution control officer at the Grand Rapids Environmental Protection Services Department. “For example, fish must take in vast amounts of water through their gills for respiration. Contaminants in the water would then enter the fish.”

But scientists are concerned.

According to the Science Advisory Board to the International Joint Commission, an independent U.S.-Canadian board that oversees issues in water that borders both countries, scientists found herring gulls that were exposed to biologically significant concentrations of estrogens. These eggs are less likely to hatch successfully. Similar effects were also seen in snapping turtles. Fish were found to have altered reproductive steroid levels and herring gulls had biochemical, thyroid and immune problems.

The Science Advisory Board recommended that a program be created to collect and destroy unused pharmaceuticals. It also suggested that no PPCPS be allowed to be discharged from wastewater plants, especially those treating hospital wastewater.

Uncertainty remains:

“There is not enough information out there to define how hazardous PPCPs will affect human beings’ health,” said Amy Perbeck, a toxicologist at the water bureau of Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

These products have been in the river forever and every part of the wastewater treatment plants has PPCPs more or less in Michigan, she said. Due to the low concentration of PPCPs, sometimes in parts per million or parts per billion, toxicologists are not certain to what degree PPCPs would affect human beings.

However, while these drugs and products may not create an immediate impact on human beings they would certainly affect the aquatic life, Perbeck said.

“Most of PPCPs are easy to decompose; they are not hazardous,” she said. “As for pharmaceuticals, they are tough and the component might be accumulated by the aquatic system.”

Although the issue of whether PPCPs might harm humans is still controversial, scientists have already anticipated its significance and conducted many studies.

In Michigan, the Department of Environmental Quality recently updated its ability to detect the compounds.

The agency monitored Monroe, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids to see if the amount of the substances varied, Perbeck said.

Grand Rapids officials have been collecting data on PPCPs on a quarterly basis all year, said Gary De Kock, the city’s wastewater plant supervisor. Their results show the levels for 31 compounds in the raw wastewater and in their treated effluent. These compounds include antibiotics, steroids, antidepressants, cholesterol, caffeine and stimulants. Grand Rapids is now evaluating the phenomena and its potential for human or environmental health effects.

Some of the compounds found in the Grand Rapids study include pain medications like Tylenol, Advil and Aspirin; cholesterol lowering drugs like Lipitor and Zocor; antibiotics, antidepressants, steroids, heart and blood pressure medicines, stimulants and drugs used to control epileptic seizures, Mort said.

The project launched by the DEQ is to develop analytical techniques and determine how fast these compounds could be removed.

One process, which adds hydrogen peroxide to ozonated water, could almost eliminate those compounds below detection level, said Richard P. Grant, P.E., a manager of process design at the Fleis and Vandenbrink Engineering, Inc. in Grand Rapids.

Detection costs are high

The costs for detecting and monitoring PPCPs are high.

“It costs $75,000 to collect only 50 samples at three sites in Michigan,” Perbeck said.

And unlike testing for bacterial contamination caused by sewage, there aren’t any standard methods for examining the samples.

“We are still in the stage of developing a specific test for PPCPs,” Perbeck said.

The cost for the hydrogen peroxide oxidation system is between $100,000 and $200,000 for a 200,000 gallons treatment plant per day, Mort said. The operating costs range from 50 cents to $10 per 1,000 gallons.

For Grand Rapids, the cost of construction would range between $25 million to $50 million dollars. Operating costs would be between $25,000 and $500,000 per day. In practice the city would build for a flow higher than average so building costs would be higher, Mort said.

About 2.4 billion gallons per day of wastewater is treated by municipal wastewater treatment plants in Michigan. The cost of upgrading all of the state’s treatment plants to control PPCPs would range from $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion. Operating costs will be at least $1.2 million per day.

Grant said he is not aware of any treatment plants removing these compounds.

“Most of the cities are still collecting information about which compound do they need to treat or which oxidation should they choose to remove these compounds,” Grant said.

Limited studies

The only comprehensive monitoring that a federal agency has done so far for PPCPs is by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The agency’s national study included three Michigan sites in the Boardman River at Traverse City, Grand Traverse and Kalkaska counties. Those sites were chosen as background sites that were considered to be relatively clean. The study detected very little amounts of compounds , said Sheridan Haack, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Christian Daughton, chief of environmental chemistry at EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, said investigoators may analyze samples from particular areas as part of ongoing PPCP research. For example, real world samples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new analytical method.

Such limited studies are really not considered monitoring, but provide little snapshots of PPCPs occurrence, he said.

“So the picture that emerges from monitoring is biased in providing only a limited picture of the overall scope of contaminants.”

Related Links

Red Cedar River (Michigan)
Red Cedar Storm
Red Cedar Floods
Red Cedar Wetlands
Red_Cedar_Sewers
Red Cedar Farm
Red Cedar Groundwater