Pharmaceuticals turning up in streams and rivers have made headlines in recent years. Now for the first time in the U.S., researchers have shown that such drugs may come directly from plants that manufacture them. Research published in Environmental Science & Technology (DOI 10.1021/es100356f) documents that treated sewage effluent from drugmakers can deliver to streams concentrations of painkillers that are as much as 1,000 times higher than levels in effluent from other sewage plants.

Until recently, scientists have assumed that the primary source of drugs in rivers was excretion by humans. Although the federal government does not regulate discharges of pharmaceutical ingredients, industry scientists have argued that tight control of production processes and the great value of the drugs would ensure that only minor amounts of active substances would escape the factories, says Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg.

But in 2007, Larsson found that a treatment plant in India that receives drug factory waste was discharging as much as 31 mg/L of antibiotics in effluent, a concentration that is orders of magnitude higher than is typically found in U.S. waste water. He found the antibiotic ciprofloxacin at concentrations higher than recommended human blood levels.

To begin to check whether the same issues might occur at the nearly 3,000 drug manufacturing facilities in the U.S., researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compared effluent from two New York state treatment plants serving drug manufacturers to 24 treatment plants not receiving pharmaceutical-plant waste in 12 states. Referring to the plants serving drugmakers, Dana Kolpin, a research hydrologist at USGS and a coauthor of the new study, says: “When we scanned the effluent samples using capillary gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, we noticed large peaks due to unknown substances.” Comparing GC/MS scans of known drugs to scans of the unknown samples allowed the researchers to determine that the unknowns were seven opiates and muscle relaxants that are among the most frequently prescribed medications in the U.S., he says.

Effluent samples from across the country showed evidence of the drugs, but concentrations were all less than 1 µg/L. However, the New York plants that serve drugmakers released the seven painkillers in concentrations ranging from 3.4µg/L to 3,800 µg/L. The highest concentration was for the muscle relaxant metaxalone.

“The concentrations coming out of effluent are much higher than we would ever have thought,” says Patrick Phillips, a USGS hydrologist and lead author of the study.

The researchers also detected the seven drugs in a drinking-water reservoir 30 km downstream of one of the New York plants.

Despite the different conditions and stringent regulations in the U.S., says Christian Daughton, an environmental toxicologist at the EPA, Phillips’s and Kolpin’s study found broadly similar results to Larsson’s study in India. However, Daughton cautions against drawing nationwide conclusions from sampling only two plants receiving pharmaceutical waste.

Still, Chris Metcalfe, an environmental toxicologist at Trent University, thinks the research should change views of drug manufacturing. “Hopefully, this study will lead to pharmaceutical companies taking ownership of their discharges,” he says.

A Chinese woman selling scorpions on stick waits for customers at a stall in Beijing, where the delicacy is fried in cooking oil.

Saving the planet one plateful at a time does not mean cutting back on meat, according to new research: the trick may be to switch our diet to insects and other creepy-crawlies.

The raising of livestock such as cows, pigs and sheep occupies two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20% of all the greenhouse gases driving global warming. As a result, the United Nations and senior figures want to reduce the amount of meat we eat and the search is on for alternatives.

A policy paper on the eating of insects is being formally considered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO held a meeting on the theme in Thailand in 2008 and there are plans for a world congress in 2013.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the author of the UN paper, says eating insects has advantages.

“There is a meat crisis,” he said. “The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out. “It is only in the western world that we don’t. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”

The advantages of this diet include insects’ high levels of protein, vitamin and mineral content. Van Huis’s latest research, conducted with colleague Dennis Oonincx, shows that farming insects produces far less greenhouse gas than livestock. Breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times less methane than livestock. The insects also produce 300 times less nitrous oxide, also a warming gas, and much less ammonia, a pollutant produced by pig and poultry farming.

Being cold-blooded, insects convert plant matter into protein extremely efficiently, Van Huis says. In addition, he argues, the health risks are lower. He acknowledges that in the west eating insects is a hard sell: “It is very important how you prepare them, you have to do it very nicely, to overcome the yuk factor.”

More than 1,000 insects are known to be eaten by choice around the world, in 80% of nations. They are most popular in the tropics, where they grow to large sizes and are easy to harvest.

The FAO’s field officer Patrick Durst, based in Bangkok, Thailand, ran the 2008 conference.

Durst helped set up an insect farming project FAO project in Laos which began in April. This involves transferring the skills of the 15,000 household locust farmers in Thailand across the border. “There were some proponents of a bigger dairy industry in Laos to improve a calcium deficiency,” says Durst, whose favourite is fried wasp – “very crispy and a nice light snack”. “But this is crazy when most Asians are lactose intolerant.” Locusts and crickets are calcium-rich and 90% of people in Laos have eaten insects at some point, he says.Durst says the FAO’s priority will be to boost the eating of insects where this is already accepted but has been in decline due to western cultural influence.

He also thinks such a boost can provide livelihoods and protect forests where many wild insects are collected. “I can see a step-by-step process to wider implementation.”

First, insects could be used to feed farmed animals such as chicken and fish which eat them naturally. Then, they could be used as ingredients.

Van Huis adds: “We’re looking at ways of grinding the meat into some sort of patty, which would be more recognisable to western palates.”

One of the few suppliers of insects for human consumption in the UK is Paul Cook, whose business Osgrow is based in Bristol. However, no matter how they are marketed or presented, Cook is not convinced they will ever become more than a novelty. “They are in the fun element … But I can’t see it ever catching on in the UK in a big way.”

[Via:Guardian]

The US Coast Guard dispatched emergency teams Tuesday after a boat crashed into an oil well off the coast of New Orleans, reportedly sending crude spewing some 20 feet into the air.

The wellhead, located about 65 miles (104 kilometers) south of New Orleans, was ruptured when it was struck by a dredge barge being pulled by a tug.

The Coast Guard said it could not immediately confirm reports (Ahemm-Hemmm, look at the video above) that a giant fountain of oil was now spewing from the damaged wellhead, which was situated only six feet (1.8 meters) below the surface of the sea.

A strike Coast Guard team from Mobile, Alabama had been dispatched by boat to the scene as well as a helicopter from New Orleans with a marine pollution investigator on board.

“There have been reports of oil from the elision and we are investigating those reports to mitigate any environmental concerns,” petty officer William Colclough, a Coast Guard spokesman, told AFP.

“The oil spill liability trust fund has been enacted to provide monetary support for any clean-up operation.”

Unrelated to the massive gusher recently capped by BP deep down on the seabed, the incident did occur in a nearby part of the Gulf of Mexico and could require clean-up vessels to be redeployed if reports are confirmed.

Source: Activist Post

Unreal: This is a video of an apparent chemtrail spraying, but spraying what, there is no mistaking that this Aircraft is spraying something, especially given the close and clear vantage point!

MOBILE, Alabama – More than a week has passed since Alabama’s beaches have seen significant oil, and despite warnings along the Gulf Coast, some swimmers are taking their chances.

News Five collected samples of water and sand from Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Katrina Key and Dauphin Island. To our eyes, the samples appeared normal, until we took them to a local lab to be tested.

The amount of oil and petroleum on Alabama’s beach should be undetectable, according to Bob Naman, an analytical chemist with nearly thirty years of experience. Naman says at most he would expect our samples to contain 5 parts per million of oil, but to his surprise, the samples we collected tested much higher.

From 16 ppm to 221 ppm, our results are concerning. Even more disturbing is what happened to a sample collected from the Dauphin Island Marina near oil containment boom.