Human Effects of Pollution, Pharmaceuticals in Drinking Water

Introduction
Ecology is the study of organisms and their relationship with the environment. As the human population grows so does our wealth of knowledge and ability to make all kinds of new products! These man made materials are essentially beneficial to our living situations but in reality they play and adverse role once their initial purpose has been carried out. In our biology class we have been studying how organisms rely on each other for energy. Recall that we talked about how you are what you eat, since when you eat something you're taking in everything that had to eat as well. In this blog you will learn about what is going into our food and drinks that you may not be aware of and I will want you to predict what kind of an effect this could have on different ecosystems.


Research Questions
On this blog you will learn the answers to the following questions:
1. Do human pharmaceuticals affect the drug levels in municipal sewage systems?
2. What implication do these drugs have on drinking water?
3. What effects do the drugs have on living organisms that live within the water ecosystems?

Your Task
Any time you see those words on this blog, it means that you having something to do that you will be graded on. Read whatever the message is and respond to the task at hand, if you have any questions, remember you can always email me at jkbaker86@gmail.com. Good Luck!

Be sure to start from the bottom of the page and work your way up... that way you will be getting the information that you need in order to respond to your tasks.

Your Task

1. Read the following article:

AP: Drugs found in Drinking Water
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-10-drugs-tap-water_N.htm

2. Find an article online from a reliable news source (remember the criteria for reliable). Post this article on this blog as a comment along with a summary of what the article says.

3. Respond to this article or anyone else's posts with any comments, thoughts, or questions that you have as a comment to the post.

4. In a separate document write a newspaper article, create a news breaking alert, or write a summary of how you think the pharmaceutical drugs in the water will effect the living organisms in it. Be sure to include what that means for the ecosystems in which they interact. Be sure to use important vocabulary that you have been studying in our Ecology unit to help support your claims.

Did you know? (2)

Did you know that as urban cities grow, in efforts to conserve and reuse water, the use of treated municipal wastewater increases drastically. This water is put through many steps of filtration and cleaning and are highly regulated for health by the federal government. A team of researchers found in 2004, that some organically synthesized molecules were making it through the filtration processes, and that in fact there were no regulations on these drugs by the government. Some of the drugs included antibiotics, mood changers, and sex hormones. The effects of these drugs in the drinking water are still not known at such low concentrations and as a mixture of all them reacting in the body.

Stackelberg, Paul E., et al. (2004). Persistence of pharmaceutical compounds and other organic wastewater contaminants in a conventional drinking-water-treatment plant. Science of the Total Environment. Issue 1-3, 99-113. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2004.03.015.

Did you know? (1)

Did you know that in 1999 a team of researchers looked at over 130 streams in the United States to  see how many of our pharmaceutical drugs and personal products were in it? They found that in over 80% of the water sources at least one type of synthetically made drug was found in the water, showing that our products flow directly into natural water environments.

Kolpin, Dana W., et al. (2002). Pharmaceuticals, Hormones, and Other Organic Wastewater Contaminants in U.S.
Streams, 1999_2000: A National Reconnaissance. Environ. Sci. Technol., 2002, 36 (6), pp 1202–1211. DOI: 10.1021/es011055j.