Estrogen & Male Feminization
(1999-2007)
Contracepting the Environment:
Environmentalists Mum on Poisoned Streams
When EPA-funded scientists at the
University of Colorado studied fish in a pristine mountain
stream known as Boulder Creek two years ago, they were shocked.
Randomly netting 123 trout and other fish downstream from the
city’s sewer plant, they found that 101 were female, 12 were
male, and 10 were strange “intersex” fish with male and female
features.
It’s “the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really
scared me,” said then 59-year-old University of Colorado
biologist John Woodling, speaking to the Denver Post in 2005.
They studied the fish and decided the main culprits were
estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth control pills
and patches, excreted in urine into the city’s sewage system and
then into the creek.
Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor David
Norris, and their EPA-study team were among the first scientists
in the country to learn that a slurry of hormones, antibiotics,
caffeine and steroids is coursing down the nation’s waterways,
threatening fish and contaminating drinking water.
Since their findings, stories have been emerging everywhere.
Scientists in western Washington found that synthetic
estrogen — a common ingredient in oral contraceptives —
drastically reduces the fertility of male rainbow trout.
Doug Myers, wetlands and habitat
specialist for Washington State’s Puget Sound Action Team, told
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that in frogs, river otters and
fish, scientists are “finding the presence of female hormones
making the male species less male.”
This summer, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the American
Pharmacists Association will begin a major public awareness
campaign regarding contamination that’s resulting from soaps and
pharmaceuticals, including birth control.
What the Boulder scientists discovered, however, is that few
people care.
Or, if they’re worried, they’re in denial.
“Nobody is getting passionately concerned about it,” Norris
said. “It makes no sense to me at all that people aren’t more
concerned.”
When the story of his finding hit Denver and Boulder newspapers,
Norris anticipated an immediate response from environmentalists,
who define the politics of Boulder and are known to picket in
the streets demanding ends to questionable farming practices,
global warming and pesticide treatments.
To the professor’s surprise, however, the hormone story was
mostly ignored.
Two years later, environmental groups have failed to take up the
cause of saving Boulder Creek and its fish from hormone
pollution.
Dave Georgis, who directs the Colorado Genetic Engineering
Action Network, took to the streets of Boulder on several
occasions to hold signs demanding that Boulder County regulate
genetically modified crops from existence.
When asked about the genetically modified fish and the
contaminated drinking water, however, he said: “It just has so
much competition out there for stuff to work on.”
He told the Boulder Weekly that nobody needed to consider
curtailing use of artificial contraceptives out of concern for
the creek.
“You can’t have a zero impact, and this is one of the many, many
impacts we have on the environment in everyday life,” Georgis
said. “Nobody is to blame for this, and I don’t have a
solution.”
Norris, an environmentalist and birth-control advocate, said
that until society achieves better sewage filtration and invents
harmless contraceptives, “there’s always abstinence, and we know
that it’s 100% effective.”
George Harden [board member of a society of social scientists,
Steubenville, Ohio]: “If you’re killing mosquitoes to save
people from the West Nile virus, you can count on secular
environmentalists to lay down in front of the vapor truck,
claiming some potential side effect that might result from the
spray,” Harden said. “But if birth control deforms fish — backed
by the proof of an EPA study — and threatens the drinking
supply, mum will be the word.”
Harden said the growing knowledge of estrogen-polluted water may
expose the cultural double-standards that protect birth control
from the scrutiny given to other chemicals and drugs.
“It’s going to start looking funny,” Harden said. “The radical
environmentalist won’t eat a corn chip if the corn contacted a
pesticide. But they view it a sacred right and obligation to
consume synthetic chemicals that alter a woman’s natural
biological functions, even if this practice threatens innocent
aquatic life downstream.”
Despite growing and nationwide knowledge of birth control
pollution in rivers and streams, leading environmentalists
remain unfazed — even in Boulder, where it’s been known about
for years.
Curt Cunningham, water quality issues chairman for the Rocky
Mountain Chapter of Sierra Club International, worked tirelessly
last year on a ballot measure that would force the City of
Boulder to remove fluoride from drinking water, because some
believe it has negative effects on health and the environment
that outweigh its benefits. But Cunningham said he would never
consider asking women to curtail use of birth control pills and
patches — despite what effect these synthetics have on rivers,
streams and drinking water.
“I suspect people would not take kindly to that,” Cunningham
said. “For many people it’s an economic necessity. It’s also a
personal freedom issue.”
As nonviolence coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Peace and
Justice Center, Betty Ball has taken to the streets with signs
in protest of genetically modified crops. She lobbies Boulder’s
city and county officials to stop spraying mosquitoes in their
effort to fight the deadly West Nile virus — a disease that
killed seven Boulder residents and caused permanent disabilities
in others during the summer of 2004.
“Right now we’re worried about weed control chemicals and
pesticides,” said Ball, when asked whether her organization
would address the hormone problem in Boulder Creek. “The water
contamination is a problem, but we don’t have the time and
resources to address it right now.”
Norris said hormones have been detected in municipal water
supplies, but he said the jury’s out on the long-term effects
the chemicals might have on humans and human sexuality.
Research by New Jersey health officials and Rutgers University
scientists found traces of birth control hormones and other
prescription drugs and preservatives in municipal tap water
throughout the state in 2003, and they don’t know the effects
long-term exposure may have.
“The question is, ‘Is this something the body deals with at low
levels, metabolizes and there’s no problem? Or is this something
that accumulates in the body?’ We just don’t know,” said Brian
Buckley, the Rutgers chemist who led the four-year drinking
water study [North Jersey News]. “To be honest, we are
just starting to deal with the question.”
Rebecca Goldburg, a New Jersey biologist working with
Environmental Defense, told the North Jersey News: “I’m not sure
I want even low levels of birth control pills in my daughter’s
drinking water.”
Ball said she’s alarmed by the sex-altered fish in Boulder
Creek, and worries about the ramifications for humans.
“Unfortunately, it is emerging as a major issue in creeks and
waterways all over the earth, and we’re seeing more and more
anomalies, not just with fish but with frogs and other aquatic
life. I think it’s a precursor to what will happen to humans who
drink contaminated water,” Ball said.
Ball said she’s shocked that citizens of Boulder haven’t
organized and taken to the streets, as many Colorado
environmentalists did upon learning that farmers and
agri-businesses were genetically altering crops. She said the
major source of contamination that’s mutating Boulder Creek fish
— birth control — makes it a political hot potato.
To avoid genetically modified crops, Ball said, one needed only
to buy organic, genetically modified organism-free products at
health food stores. Asking residents to stop polluting water
with hormones, however, “gets into the bedroom.” “I’m not going
there,” Ball said. “This involves people’s personal lives, child
bearing issues, sex lives and personal choices."
“Apathy is the fear of sticking your toe in, for fear it will
change your life. Sometimes positive change does require a
change in lifestyle.”
[July 15-21, 2007 (Posted 7/10/07), NCR, Wayne Laugesen,
Boulder CO]
Media Takes Notice
“Chemicals in the contraceptive pill and other products are
altering the reproductive processes of fish.”
— Metro UK, March 2007
“Many streams, rivers and lakes already bear warning signs that
the fish caught within them may also be carrying enough
chemicals that mimic the female hormone estrogen to cause breast
cancer cells to grow.” — Scientific American, April, 2007
“In the Potomac River, male smallmouth bass are sprouting eggs,
and scientists blame pollution and the Pill.”
— Stanford Daily, July 5, 2007
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2003
Canadian scientists have found that water in a pond (created
for this experiment) contaminated with estrogen from
birth-control pills is having disastrous effects on male fish
species.
Studies have shown that male fish, from tadpoles to lake
trout, are becoming "feminized", meaning that egg proteins are
growing abnormally in their bodies, rendering them incapable of
reproducing. In fact, the entire Fathead minnow population was
nearly wiped out in this pond. "It's a feminization...it's
enough to be concerned about what's going on in the bigger
picture (from estrogen)", said karen Kidd, a research scientist
at the Canadian Freshwater Institute.
Now the U.S. Geological Survey's Columbia Environmental
Research Center is studying whether estrogen-contaminated water
is affecting human males as well.
As early as 1992, the Cincinnati Enquirer [11Sept92]
reported that the sperm count in healthy males had dropped by
half in the past 50 years, according to a global review of 61
studies involving nearly 15,000 men. Also, the risk of
developing testicular cancer is up by 50% over the past 25
years, although neither have been attributed to estrogen
contamination at this time.
Serious consideration should also be given to estrogen's
effect on the male offspring of women who are on the birth
control pill. Of the 10.4 million pill users in America, over 5
percent, or one-half million, get pregnant each year (i.e. the
pill fails) according to the FDA. How does pill estrogen affect
these children conceived during pill use?
We know today that women who were given Diethylstilbestrol
(DES) in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, have a 35% increased risk
of developing breast cancer. Their daughters (and in some cases,
their sons) have a higher rate of infertility and increased risk
of unsuccessful pregnancies. A rare form of vaginal cancer in
the daughters of women who were using DES has been attributed to
this therapy...
[Compiled by Human Life Alliance, HLA Action News, Summer
2003 from reports in Couple to Couple League's MedWatch, the St.
Paul Pioneer Press 28June2003; HLI Special Report, 1998, and
Aging Today, May/June 2003]
HUMAN ESTROGENS FOUND TO BE POLLUTING THE ENVIRONMENT
Safe, healthy, effective...and now add environmentally
friendly to the list of attributes for Natural Family Planning.
This distinction comes amidst the growing realization of
environmental pollution caused by birth control pills and other
commonly used pharmaceuticals.
The alarm was first sounded in Switzerland and Europe, but
recently has come home to the U.S. as researchers have shown
that human estrogens in wastewater effluents cause sex changes
in fish living in affected areas.
Endocrine disrupters include a broad category of chemical
compounds that mimic or block the action of hormones. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency is launching a massive program
to screen 15,000 chemicals widely used in household or
industrial products including paints, detergents, lubricants,
cosmetics, textiles, pesticides, and plastics for endocrine
effects.
However, a large part of the problem may be much less
mysterious.
Human estrogens in the form of 17b-estradiol and its
metabolites, as well as ethinyl estradiol and mestranol --
commonly used in birth control pills and hormone replacement
therapies -- have been detected in U.S. wastewaters.
Up to 30 other pharmaceuticals, ranging from commonly used
drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen to clofibrate (a
cholesterol-lowering drug) and cyclophosphamide (a drug used in
chemotherapy), have been detected in the environment.
Antibiotics used not only in human therapy, but also in
veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, and aquiculture can be
found at levels that can cause development of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In fish, estrogen-contaminated water has the effect of
producing in males a yolk protein called vintellogenin, that is
normally produced only in females. Sex changes caused by
estrogens in other aquatic animals are also suspected. The human
health effects from long-term exposure to low levels of
estrogens are unknown. Although the risks are thought to be
small, it is possible that mixtures of substances may have an
addictive or even synergistic effect.
Such concerns are prompting action by regulatory officials in
Europe. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently
relaxed manufacturer's environmental reporting requirements
unless drug levels are expected to exceed the part per billion
level. However, scientists have observed vitellogenin in male
fish at estrogen concentrations between 1 and 10 parts per
trillion.
Research is just beginning to evaluate the effectiveness of
wastewater treatment processes for the removal of
pharmaceuticals from water. Evidence is that synthetic estrogens
are more stable and are not removed by typical wastewater
treatment processes. Advanced processes using membrane filters
are effective but are commonly not used, and it would be
expensive to install them nationwide. Requirements for
environmental impact assessments for drug manufacturers should
be tightened to include low-level waterborne fate-and-transport
studies and possible control measures. Moreover, drug companies
could be required to pay for clean-up costs and treatment
upgrades when pharmaceuticals are found to harm humans or the
environment.
...Previous concerns about moral
ecology that perserves the sanctity of the marriage covenant and
produces a wholesome family environment now can be extended to
protecting our physical environment. Because the practice of NFP
involves no drugs, it respects not only a woman's body, but the
world around it.
[Mark LeChevallier is a microbiology researcher in New Jersey;
CCL Family Foundations, May-June 1999]
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