Comments by "Paddle Duck" (@paddleduck5328) on "Chemtrails Conspiracy Theorist Loses His Mind" video.
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“Pharmaceutical pollution doesn't seem to be harming humans yet, but disturbing clues from aquatic life suggest now is the time for preventive action.
Although maybe not as tasty as an ice-cold gulp from a mountain spring, the water that flows through most American kitchen faucets is generally clean, clear, and safe. Approximately 170,000 public water systems are monitored for nearly 80 harmful substances. The prohibited nasties include bacteria, viruses, pesticides, petroleum products, strong acids, and some metals.
But water quality experts and environmental advocates are increasingly concerned about another kind of water pollution: chemicals from prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications that get into lakes, rivers, and streams. Water also gets contaminated by perfume, cologne, skin lotions, and sunscreens that wash off people's skin.
At this point, there's really no evidence of pharmaceutical and personal care products in the water harming people, but studies are showing adverse effects on aquatic life.
Drug take-back programs, which allow people to drop off their unused medications at central locations, serve two purposes. They keep unused drugs out of the water and prevent diversion of drugs, mainly the opioid painkillers, for recreation and illegal purposes.
Another step in the right direction is new guidelines from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that discourage hospitals and nursing homes from flushing unused drugs down the drain or toilet. Guidelines for individuals also discourage flushing most, but not all, unused drugs. The question now is whether these and other efforts will be enough to keep the chemicals out of the water at a time when the use of pharmaceuticals and personal care products continues to grow at a rapid rate.
The sources
Reliable figures are hard to come by, but it's a safe assumption that we, as consumers, are responsible for a hefty percentage of the pharmaceutical and personal care products that wind up in lakes, rivers, and streams. The typical American medicine cabinet is full of unused and expired drugs, only a fraction of which get disposed of properly. Data collected from a medication collection program in California in 2007 suggest that about half of all medications — both prescription and over-the-counter — are discarded. That's probably a high-end estimate, but even if the real proportion is lower, there's a lot of unused medication that can potentially get into the water.
Chemicals also get into the water from the drugs we use. Our bodies metabolize only a fraction of most drugs we swallow. Most of the remainder is excreted in urine or feces (some is sweated out) and therefore gets into wastewater. An increasing number of medications are applied as creams or lotions, and the unabsorbed portions of those medications can contribute to the pollution problem when they get washed off. It's been calculated, for example, that one man's use of testosterone cream can wind up putting as much of the hormone into the water as the natural excretions from 300 men.
Health care institutions are another source of pharmaceutical water pollution. Hospitals are probably less of a problem than nursing homes because they typically have on-site pharmacies with arrangements in place to return unused drugs to manufacturers for credit or disposal. Nursing homes, though, have often been guilty of flushing medications down the toilet or drain after a patient dies or is transferred to another facility. Typically, they don't have the same kind of return arrangements as hospitals. And the rules for getting rid of opioid painkillers, which make disposal down the drain an acceptable option, have inadvertently encouraged some nursing homes to dispose of all their leftover medications that way.
Drug manufacturing also results in some pharmaceutical pollution, although some factories are bigger problem than others. For example, a U.S. Geological Survey study found contamination levels downstream from two drug manufacturing plants in New York State that were 10 to 1,000 times higher than those at comparable facilities around the country.
Agriculture is another major source. The two trillion pounds of animal waste generated by large-scale poultry and livestock operations in this country is laced with hormones and antibiotics fed to animals to make them grow faster and to keep them from getting sick. Inevitably, some of those hormones and antibiotics leach into groundwater or get into waterways.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/drugs-in-the-water
Thanks for the tip! You were right about the excretion.
LOL now that the trend for guys using testosterone is going up, it’s probably begun to counteract it..and maybe soon we’ll see it start making women grow beards! 😆
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