Food safety is always a huge issue, and we all want to believe that everything we eat, especially those that come from natural sources, are safe and clean for consumption. However, due to bad waste management practices from huge companies, this is not always the case.
Environmental toxicologists in September 2014, found the presence of various chemical compounds such as Lipitor, caffeine, nicotine, Prozac, Valium, Oxycontin and cocaine in the waters of Balir Waterway in Tacoma's Commencement Bay, which are but a small part of the 29 Contaminants of Emerging concern detected in wastewater plants near estuaries containing Pacific Salmon.
These chemicals were also found in the tissue of the fish in amounts that could have effects when consumed.
Jim Meador, an environmental toxicologist told the Seattle times that the concentration of these chemicals in waste were higher than expected. "We analyzed samples for 150 compounds and we had 61 percent of them detected in effluent. So we know these are going into the estuaries."
Meador is the lead author of a study on a journal Environmental Pollution, he is an environmental toxicologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NFSC) in Seattle.
He has also mentioned that the level of contaminants are a real cause for concern and the culprit behind it remains unclear, if it's caused by inadequate wastewater treatment or a high rate of drug usage in people living nearby.
"You have treatment doing its best to remove these, chemically and biologically, but it's not just the treatment quality, it's also the amount that we use day to day and our assumption that it just goes away, but not everything goes away." Betsy Cooper told the Seattle Times, she is a Wastewater Treatment Division permit administrator.
Even waters in Southen Ontario had traces of the chemicals including cocaine, morphine and oxycodone. Some other drugs found in samples of fish tissue and water are Flonase, Tylenol, Paxil, Zoloft, antiseptics, anticoagulants and a myriad of antibiotics.
