Yes sir, that lovely range of psycho-pharmaceuticals we love so much, and which help people with a number of problems, from anxiety to depression, are ending up in the river when they leave our bodies.
Scientists from several around the world have tested perch to see if the medicines we take are being 'taken' by the fish too.
What was surprising and troublesome, is that the concentration of said compounds in the fish muscle was found to be sixfold that of the surrounding water. That indicates that the chemicals accumulate with age in the fish's body.
The next step in the research was to ascertain if the chemicals are affecting the fish's behavior. Starting with a laboratory batch of fish in a clean tank and comparing their behavior with that of the fish who had been exposed to the medical compounds in the rivers, and another batch in a tank where the water had 500 times the level of chemicals found in the river waters, researchers found that the fish that had been in the contaminated river were less social than the ones who came from the pure water tank, and were more skittish and ate more voraciously than their counterpart. In the high exposure tank, the ones subjected to the 500fold concentration of chemicals in the water, the fish exhibited even more bizarre behavior. They seem to exhibit 'fearless' behavior, even abandoning the safe confines usually adopted by the school and from which neither of the two other groups dared to stray.
This kind of testing will be crucial if the United States is to implement a program to monitor pharmaceutical castoff in the rivers and other waterways. It is also important in measuring what if any accumulation of the chemicals will mean to people to consume the fish,
Source: NYT 2.16.13
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