Member blog | Bertil Hagström, General practitioner, PhD - Swedish Doctors for the Environment

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After passing through sewage treatment plants, approximately 40 tonnes of antibiotics and other drug residues can be found in Sweden’s sewage sludge, along with a variety of other hazardous chemicals. Even larger quantities find their way into our lakes and seas.

As healthcare professionals, we have a responsibility to the health of our patients and communities. Whilst we must carefully consider the full impact of our prescribing practices and our own contribution to this growing issue, we cannot ignore regulatory and policy solutions – we must act as advocates for more sustainable sewage management.

The health and environmental effects of sewage sludge

Many pharmaceutical residues, pollutants, and industrial chemicals, produced both inside and outside our country end up in sewage sludge systems through household sewage and wastewater, but also from small and large local industries, roads, hospitals, and street drains. Pollution from all forms of consumables comes from global production and trade and there are hundreds of thousands of foreign substances in sewage sludge.

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by University of Plymouth

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The increased global use of antiviral and antiretroviral medication could have a detrimental impact on crops and potentially heighten resistance to their effects, new research has suggested.

Scientists from the UK and Kenya found that lettuce plants exposed to a higher concentration of four commonly-used drugs could be more than a third smaller in biomass than those grown in a drug-free environment.

They also examined how the chemicals transferred throughout the crop and found that, in some cases, concentrations were as strong in the leaves as they were in the roots.

The study—published in Science of the Total Environment—was conducted by environmental chemists from the University of Plymouth (UK), Kisii University (Kenya) and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya).

It is one of the first worldwide to examine the impact of pharmaceutical compounds on agriculture, and to consider the subsequent risks for consumers.

For it, scientists focused on the drugs nevirapine, lamivudine and efavirenz—which are used to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS—and oseltamivir, which stops the spread of the flu virus in the body.

However, they say it is also relevant in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, with antiviral medications having been approved for use to treat those affected by the virus.

Such compounds get into soils when they are irrigated with contaminated surface water, treated or untreated waste water, sewage sludge and biosolids.
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More microplastics are contaminating agricultural lands than oceans, impacting plant development and ending up in produce and people.

BY KATE S. PETERSEN, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH NEWSJANUARY 27, 2021

Mary Beth Kirkham hadn’t studied microplastics when she was invited to co-edit a new book about microplastics in the environment—but something stood out to her about the existing research.

“I had read in the literature that . . . cadmium and other toxic trace elements [are] increased when we have these particulate plastics in the soil. So, that was of concern to me,” said Kirkham, a plant physiologist and distinguished professor of agronomy at Kansas State University.

Kirkham’s expertise is in water and plant relations and heavy metal uptake, so she decided to conduct her own research in which she cultivated wheat plants exposed to microplastics, cadmium, and both microplastics and cadmium. Then she compared these plants to those grown without either additive.

read full article at Civil Eats

A Danish study found that people with elevated levels of a compound called PFBA were more than twice as likely to have a severe form of Covid-19.

by Sharon Lerner
December 7 2020, 10:53 a.m.

ELEVATED LEVELS OF a PFAS compound were associated with more severe forms of Covid-19, according to a Danish study now undergoing peer review. The research, which involved 323 patients infected with the coronavirus, found that those who had elevated levels of a chemical called PFBA were more than twice as likely to have a severe form of the disease.

PFBA is one of a class of industrial compounds, often called “forever chemicals,” that has come to contaminate soil, water, and food around the world. It has been presented as relatively safe because it stays in human blood for much less time than some of the other compounds in the class and is a shorter molecule. Both traits are thought to be indications of its innocuousness. PFBA, which was created by 3M, is based on a four-carbon chain and is gone from human blood in a matter of days. It is still in use, while PFOA, which is based on eight carbons and stays in the human blood for years, has been phased out since 2015.

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Stubenrauch, J.; Ekardt, F. Plastic Pollution in Soils: Governance Approaches to Foster Soil Health and Closed Nutrient Cycles. Environments 2020, 7, 38.

Abstract

Plastic pollution in soils pose a major threat to soil health and soil fertility that are directly linked to food security and human health. In contrast to marine plastic pollution, this ubiquitous problem is thus far scientifically poorly understood and policy approaches that tackle plastic pollution in soils comprehensively do not exist. In this article, we apply a qualitative governance analysis to assess the effectiveness of existing policy instruments to avoid harmful plastic pollution in (agricultural) soils against the background of international environmental agreements. In particular, environmental and fertiliser legislation relevant to soil protection in the European Union and in Germany are assessed. Regulatory weaknesses and gaps of the respective legislation are identified, and proposals for enhanced command-and-control provisions developed. However, the legal analysis furthermore shows that plastic pollution ecologically is also a problem of quantity, which is difficult to solve exclusively through command-and-control legislation. Instead, comprehensive quantity-control instruments to phase out fossil fuels (worldwide and in all sectors) as required by climate protection law can be effective approaches to tackle plastic pollution in environmental media like agricultural soils as well.

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by David L. Lewis
Retired, U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, National Exposure Research Laboratory (1968-2003), Athens, Georgia USA

Despite overwhelming evidence that certain heavy metals, toxic organic chemicals and infectious agents play an important role in triggering autism and other environmental health problems, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency supports land application of largely unmonitored concentrations of these contaminants in biosolids.

ABSTRACT

Before Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972, municipalities throughout the United States discharged hazardous municipal and industrial wastes directly into rivers and other waterways. Every chemical and biological agent linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, including those linked to “autism spectrum disorders” (ASDs), spilled into coastal waters and settled on the bottoms of the oceans. The solution to pollution was dilution. To comply with the Clean Water Act of 1972, President Carter created wastewater treatment plants throughout the United States to extract heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals from water and concentrate them in sewage sludges that were dumped offshore and buried in landfills. In 1988, Congress banned ocean dumping of sewage sludges because of their potential for causing vaccine-derived polio epidemics. Suddenly, high concentrations of every heavy metal, toxic organic chemical and vaccine-derived viruses linked to autism, including rubella and cytomegalovirus, had no place to go but land. The solution to pollution shifted from diluting pollutants in water to concentrating them on land at hundreds of thousands to millions of times higher concentrations, including on commercial farms that produce our nation’s food supplies. Now, all of the most dangerous pollutants regulated by EPA no longer require biomagnification up the food chain to harm public health. Promoted by EPA and the USDA as safe and environmentally beneficial, land application practices quickly spread worldwide. Here, the author relies largely, albeit not exclusively, on EPA’s own research to address the implications. As a whole, it indicates that the global shift that EPA’s 503 Sludge Rule created in the accumulation of pollutants from ocean sediments to populated land surfaces is causally related to sharp increases in the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders worldwide. Autism in its severe infantile form is more or less at the center of this entire class of disorders that appears to have become epidemic beginning in late 1988. EPA dismissed controversial claims linking MMR vaccination to autism, but never addressed the role that widespread land application of sewage sludges (a.k.a. biosolids), which contain highly virulent strains of vaccine-derived measles, rubella and other viruses, may play in autism. Notwithstanding this glaring omission, the global shift that EPA policies on biosolids created in human exposures to complex mixtures of measles, rubella and other viruses derived from live vaccines, combined with high concentrations of potentially every heavy metal and chemical pollutant linked to autism, could explain sharp increases in the incidences of autism and other ASDs that began in 1988.

Lewis, D. (2020). The Autism Biosolids Conundrum. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research. Vol. 1 No. 1 (2020): Inaugural Issue. Published 2020-07-15.

BY LAURIE VALERIANO AND SARAH DOLL, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 05/28/20 03:30 PM EDT

Infectious disease experts, scientists, and doctors have warned about the potential for a pandemic for years. Microsoft founder Bill Gates did a TED Talk on it and U.S. intelligence agencies knew it was a real threat. There was even a major USAID program, recently de-funded, called Predict, designed to head off pandemics.

And now, these scientific warnings have come true.

The once invisible threat of a virus spreading throughout our country is painfully visible today. Given a choice, wouldn’t we all choose to prevent the spread of this horrible virus in the first place?

It’s too late to stop COVID-19 from entering our lives. But there is another invisible threat to our health and well-being we can address.

Similar to those who cautioned us about a disease like COVID-19, leading public health experts, scientists, and doctors today warn us that exposure to toxic chemicals is contributing to rates of chronic illnesses.

Many of these chemicals are found in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the products in our homes. And many of these illnesses worsen the impacts of COVID-19.

Experts have been calling attention to these invisible threats for decades. Meanwhile, companies are still putting harmful chemicals into the products they make.

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Pete Myers and Dr. Theo Colburn co-authored Our Stolen Future, explaining the science behind how synthetic chemicals interfere with hormonal action in people. Interfering with your hormones can cause a long list of health problems, including impairing your resistance to disease.

Dr. Linda Birnbaum, over her decades-long career, including as director of the National Institutes for Environmental Health, has been at the forefront of building the overwhelming scientific case revealing the toxic chemical crisis and its harmful impacts on public health. Recently, she pointed out that endocrine-disrupting chemicals “increase the diseases that cause the underlying conditions that result in susceptibility to COVID-19.”

Your family, friends, and neighbors are more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus if their defenses have been compromised by chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes, or asthma. And scientific experts have found these and other health problems are all linked to exposure to toxic chemicals.

For example, chemicals called PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are linked to many chronic illnesses as well as suppression of the immune system. And yet they are still commonly used for stain resistance and water repellency in millions of consumer products, such as carpets, food packaging, and furniture. A Harvard study found millions of people in the U.S. are drinking unsafe levels of PFAS in their water.

Our existing federal regulatory systems are failing us by allowing hazardous chemicals to contaminate people and the planet. Current laws allow the most dangerous chemicals to be used in everyday consumer products—from cosmetics and clothing to electronics and home furnishings.

If we’ve learned anything from our current crisis, it’s that we must heed the advice of health and medical experts. We must aggressively invest in prevention, safer alternatives, and our public health infrastructure. We need to build healthier and more resilient communities as a key step dramatically reducing people’s exposure to harmful chemicals must be a public health priority.

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© Malaysiakini (English)

CORONAVIRUS | Malaysian researchers are studying if traces of the Covid-19 virus found in the sewerage system may be used to detect infections in communities, particularly those who do not show any symptoms (asymptomatic cases).

Virologist Associate Prof Dr Nazlina Ibrahim told Bernamathe most vital aspect of the study would be to check the viral content of the sewage in any particular area in order to identify communities with Covid-19 positive cases but have yet to be screened.

“Sewage samples from the sewerage system in potential high-risk areas can be taken to monitor the presence of Covid-19 virus. The findings will help the Ministry of Health to identify infected locations and carry out health screenings for the residents there,” said Nazlina, who is a senior lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Faculty of Science and Technology.

On March 28, Environment and Water Minister Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man had said that his ministry would conduct a comprehensive study to find out if the Covid-19 virus – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 or Sars-CoV-2 – can live and reproduce in the public sewerage system.

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Secret Environment Agency report finds sewage sludge destined for English fields contaminated with microplastics, weedkiller, and “persistent organic pollutants”

by Crispin Dowler and Zach Boren

A secret report obtained by Unearthed has revealed serious weaknesses in the Environment Agency’s controls on an industry that spreads millions of tonnes of sewage sludge on farmland each year.

Investigators commissioned by the agency found sewage waste destined for English crops contaminated with dangerous “persistent organic pollutants” like dioxins, fuerans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at “levels that may present a risk to human health”.

They reported evidence that these sludges, which are routinely spread as fertiliser on hundreds of farms, were widely contaminated with microplastics that could ultimately leave soil “unsuitable for agriculture”.

They found various cases of sludge treated with lime in an attempt to kill harmful bugs, but which still tested positive for salmonella or “high concentrations of e-coli”. These bacteria can cause serious or even fatal infections.

And they warned that the task of regulating this “landspreading” industry was “becoming more difficult”, because the Environment Agency (EA) staff responsible were being hit with “increased time pressures and reduced budgets”.

The report – which proposed a suite of reforms to landspreading regulation – was handed to the agency in late 2017. But neither the environmental regulator nor the government has so far made changes in response, and the findings have remained secret until now.

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Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products: From Wastewater Treatment into Agro-Food Systems
Qiuguo Fu, Tomer Malchi, Laura J. Carter, Hui Li, Jay Gan, and Benny Chefetz
Environmental Science & Technology 2019 53 (24), 14083-14090
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b06206

ABSTRACT

Irrigation with treated wastewater (TWW) and application of biosolids introduce numerous pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) into agro-food systems. While the use of TWW and biosolids has many societal benefits, introduction of PPCPs in production agriculture poses potential food safety and human health risks. A comprehensive risk assessment and management scheme of PPCPs in agro-food systems is limited by multiple factors, not least the sheer number of investigated compounds and their diverse structures. Here we follow the fate of PPCPs in the water-soil-produce continuum by considering processes and variables that influence PPCP transfer and accumulation. By analyzing the steps in the soil-plant-human diet nexus, we propose a tiered framework as a path forward to prioritize PPCPs that could have a high potential for plant accumulation and thus pose greatest risk. This article examines research progress to date and current research challenges, highlighting the potential value of leveraging existing knowledge from decades of research on other chemicals such as pesticides. A process-driven scheme is outlined to derive a short list that may be used to refocus our future research efforts on PPCPs and other analogous emerging contaminants in agro-food systems.

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