Mussels off the coast of Seattle test positive for opioids

[Kilgore]

As more and more American communities grapple with opioid addiction, the human toll of the epidemic has grown in both scope and severity. And now, scientists at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that drug's impact has literally flowed downstream to affect marine life, as well.

Specifically, they used mussels as a barometer of pollution in the waters off Seattle, and discovered that oxycodone is now present enough in the marine environment there for shellfish to test positive.

When humans ingest opioids like oxycodone, they ultimately end up excreting traces of the drugs into the toilet. Those chemicals then end up in wastewater. And while many contaminants are filtered out of wastewater before it's released into the oceans, wastewater management systems can't entirely filter out drugs. Thus, opioids, antidepressants, the common chemotherapy drug Melphalan -- the mussels tested positive for all of them.

"What we eat and what we excrete goes into the Puget Sound," Jennifer Lanksbury, a biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO. "It's telling me there's a lot of people taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound area."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mussels-test-positive-for-opioids-seattle-puget-sound/

[unblock]

1. The breakfast garbage you throw out the bay

They eat for lunch in San Jose

[C_U_L8R]

2. Happy as a clam?

[snort]

3. What's next, fish getting hooked?

[NCTraveler]

4. These things tend to wake some people up.

Tampa Bay became an absolute shithole with the lack of fertilizer regulation, building a causeway where a full bridge should have been built, the mass dumping of sewage, etc....

The Bay got so bad that north of the Gandy Bridge the beaches were often closed due to the high bacteria count. Some of the blooms I saw in my favorite fishing spots actually gave the water the appearance of being thick.

They increased the fines for the illegal dumping of sewage(In the 80's the trucks would go through neighborhoods butting up against creeks that emptied into the bay and dump their loads down manholes) and got a lot more strict with fertilizer regulations. Our shelves clear of granular fertilizer before the start of the summer. They literally don't allow the sale.

What did people get to see. An immediate benefit to the bay. Literally in the first year of the fertilizer ban.

Seeing is believing.

We still have a long way to go in the Tampa area. We seem to love dumping shit into the Bay.