wafflycat said:
Trying to think about that logically ...
We pee, it goes into the water system anyway, we use the water system to drink, water plants etc., so it gets into the food chain anyway - blokes drink the stuff (water I'm referring to, unless you're Rolf Harris), so perhaps blokes shouldn't drink at all ...
It could also relate to the decrease in fertility.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-105466/Fertility-timebomb-drinking-water.html
The fertility of a generation of men is being put at risk because a hormone found in the Pill is getting into drinking water, scientists fear.
Pollution due to the chemical, a powerful form of oestrogen, is causing up to half the male fish in our lowland rivers to change sex, research shows.
Experts believe the hormone could be getting into drinking water and affecting men's sperm counts. They say sewage treatment does not remove the chemical entirely from drinking supplies, although the water industry insists there is no evidence of a risk to health.
A study to be published by the Environment Agency later this month says entire fish stocks in some stretches of water are irreversibly affected. Scientists believe the synthetic oestrogen can feminise-fish at levels as low as one part per billion.
Professor Charles Tyler, one of the leaders of the research, told BBC1's Countryfile: 'Some of the concentrations where we are seeing effects on fish are below the detection limit in place for testing our drinking water. So we cannot be sure that some of these compounds aren't getting into our drinking water.'
The study on roach stocks from ten rivers found nearly half of male fish had eggs in their testes or female reproductive ducts. A tenth were sterile and another quarter had damaged sperm.
Dr Susan Jobling, from the research team, said: 'There are very real reasons to be worried about whether male reproductive health could also be affected.'
The discovery that half the male fish in Britain's rivers are changing sex - and that the hormone responsible may be getting into drinking water - is just the latest example of how nature can give us nasty surprises.
For, despite our frequent boast that we have conquered the natural world, it has a habit of striking back in ways we least expect.
Millions of women have found the Pill to be a blessing and, although it might pose some health risks, no one expected it to cause an environmental crisis. On the contrary, it promised to avert catastrophe by helping to slow population growth.
But now scientists have found that ethanol oestradiol - a chemical used in the Pill which is between 50 to 100 times more powerful than natural oestrogens - is responsible for feminising fish.
Excreted in women's urine and passing through sewage works, it is causing the fish to develop eggs in their testes and, in some cases, creating female reproductive ducts.
Although scientists do not yet know whether this is affecting people, we do know that one-third of our drinking water comes from rivers - most of it
from stretches situated below sewage works. And we also know that sperm counts have been dropping alarmingly.
One study by the Medical Research Council found that Scottish men born since 1970 are 25 per cent less fertile than those born 20 years earlier - and that fertility is continuing to drop by two per cent a year.
Of course, other chemicals may be responsible, for we are increasingly discovering that we are surrounded by 'gender-bending' substances.
Many pesticides and plastics, for example, contain chemicals that disrupt the hormone system.
They have also been widely found in food and drink, including in baby milk formula.
These developments underline three lessons we must learn about nature.
First, it is far too complex for us to predict how it will react to changes brought about by man. Second, it gives little away for free - and if we make heavy demands, it exacts a high price.
And last, it has no reset button: we cannot quickly put things back the way they were, if at all.
The world has been trying to drum these lessons into us since the dawn of civilisation.
The oldest known written story, the epic of Gilgamesh, warns against cutting down the cedar forests of Mesopotamia.
But the moral was disregarded and what was once the city of Uruk is now just a bump in the sand of the resulting desert.
Over the generations we have learnt - usually the hard way - that wanton environmental damage causes disaster.
But nature is now also teaching us that well-meaning actions can have nasty consequences if not enough care is taken.
Antibiotics are one of the greatest boons humanity has produced. But their overuse has caused a dangerous resistant bacteria which a House of Lords committee concluded last year had become 'endemic in almost all hospitals'.
Pesticides may have helped to feed the world but misusing them has bred more than 1,000 types of weeds, insects and diseases that can withstand them.
Equally, we built tall chimneys to disperse air pollution, only to find that thousands of lakes 'died' in Scandinavia because the pollutants were carried hundreds of miles on the winds to fall as acid rain.
More recently, scientists have been shocked to find pesticides used in the tropics turning up in high concentrations in the Arctic.
In another example, Australia imported toads from the Caribbean to eat a beetle that was devastating its sugar canes. But instead of seeing off the beetles, the toads have proliferated over Queensland, devastating wildlife.
Nearer home, the North American grey squirrel - first released in Britain at Woburn Abbey in 1890 - has almost wiped out our native red species.
Perhaps most dramatic of all, apparently benign chemicals have been devastating the vital ozone layer. CFCs were widely used because they were stable, inert and non-toxic.
But their very stability allowed them to rise into the stratosphere and attack the natural shield that protects us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
They are now being phased out around the world, but the Antarctic ozone hole will take at least a century to close.
Shocks are certainly in store. By definition, we can't predict them. But the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has just raised a particularly alarming possibility.
It noted that in the geological past the Earth often flipped into a wholly different - much hotter or much cooler - climate in the space just a few years.
Global warming, it suggested, could make that happen again, and abruptly end the benign climate that has allowed the growth of human civilisation.
So the fish in Britain's rivers may be the aquatic equivalent of miners' canaries, warning us to take much greater care in the future if mankind is to avoid more dangerous threats to our existence.
http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=297
Scientists found that sewage treatment works are releasing significant volumes of chemicals that inhibit the function of testosterone, the male hormone, into British rivers. They call these chemicals 'anti-androgens'; such pollutants might include compounds used in pharmaceuticals, cleaning products, cancer treatments and pesticides.
These anti-androgens are likely to contribute to fish feminisation - a process whereby male fish develop some female reproductive characteristics, reducing the quality and number of sperm they produce and probably also their ability to compete to pass on their genes. In other studies exposure to anti-androgens has also been linked to damage to human reproductive health.
Scientists already suspected that the female hormone estrogen could cause feminisation in fish, but it turns out that a whole cocktail of chemicals acting in combination is likely to be behind the problem.
'Our research shows that a much wider range of chemicals than we previously thought is leading to hormone disruption in fish,' says Professor Charles Tyler at the University of Exeter, one of the paper's authors. 'This means that the pollutants causing these problems are likely to be coming from a wide variety of sources.'
Tyler adds that 'the circle is getting tighter' in establishing the hypothesis that similar pollution may also be causing male fertility problems in humans, though he notes that no such connection has yet been proved.
He explains that in the lab exposures to estrogenic chemicals at the concentrations found in the natural environment do not seem to cause problems of the severity seen in wild fish; when the oestrogens are combined with anti-androgens the mixture is likely to produce the effects seen in polluted rivers.
The study was carried out by the Universities of Brunel, Exeter and Reading with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, with statistical modelling support from Beyond the Basics Ltd, and appears in
Environmental Health Perspectives. It is based on more than 1000 fish sampled over three years from 30 rivers across England, and on samples of effluent from 43 sewage works.
'We have been working intensively in this field for over ten years,' says Dr Susan Jobling at Brunel's Institute for the Environment, lead author on the paper. 'The new research findings illustrate the complexities in unravelling chemical causation of adverse health effects in wildlife populations and re-open the possibility of a human-wildlife connection in which effects seen in wild fish and in humans are caused by similar combinations of chemicals.'
Something in the water
