We’re turning our rivers, lakes and oceans into soups of pharmaceutical pollution.... Nearly 1,000 pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the world....
As [Brand] expected, the [salmon] exposed to clobazam showed riskier behavior... “They were just sort of beelining it through the dams and making their way down the river instead of sitting around the dam and waiting for other shoal mates.Yet that bolder behavior didn’t reduce the number of fish that reached the sea. The clobazam-drugged salmon swam through one of the two hydropower dams 2½ to three times faster than the others, the scientists found, noting that prior research has shown dams increase the danger that young salmon get eaten, exhaust themselves, mistime their entry to the sea or get killed by the dam itself....
How worried are you about the drugs human beings are urinating into the water supply? Maybe you don't care if salmon become more daring or whatever, but aren't we, the humans, ultimately drinking that water?
Are we getting drugs that are changing us? Consider: "Kennedy plans autism studies aimed at identifying 'environmental toxins' linked to rise/Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed — without evidence — that environmental exposures, such as food or medicine, are most likely contributing to rising autism rates in kids" (NBC News).
Are we getting drugs that are changing us? Consider: "Kennedy plans autism studies aimed at identifying 'environmental toxins' linked to rise/Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed — without evidence — that environmental exposures, such as food or medicine, are most likely contributing to rising autism rates in kids" (NBC News).
Posts
85 comments:
First they came for the Salmon,
And I said nothing.
Except have them for Dinner.
"Clobazam" is a great word. It sounds like something that would show up in a word bubble from a 1950s Batman comic book. To whoever at Amneal Pharmaceuticals came up with it, bravo.
Clobazam clobbers depression.
But when salmon take too much of it, they develop suicidal thoughts and tendencies.
"aren't we, the humans, ultimately drinking that water?"
No. Nobody is drinking your piss. Sheesh, woman. Get a grip.
Have you seen the series of reaction videos where a woman becomes more and more anxious and distressed watching a video of a toddler's toy box, where different shaped objects should fit into different shaped holes in the lid? In the videos, every single piece is put into the box through only the square hole, because all the different shaped pieces will fit through just the square hole to go into the box. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNa-8tFoUxs&start=1
Kennedy, like so many of his political relatives, is fitting every possible shape through a square hole, causing dismay to observers. He may have a point, but probably not, and is also probably missing or ignoring many other possibilities that might be very important. Still, no worse and probably better than the Department handling of COVID.
A word to the ignorant: "The chances that a glass of tap water in the United States contains water molecules that were once part of a human urine stream are extremely high, likely close to 100%, due to the nature of the water cycle and wastewater treatment processes" (Grok).
"Nearly 1,000 pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the world.... "
At what level were they detected? We have developed the ability to detect chemicals at extremely low concentrations.
"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed — without evidence — that environmental exposures, such as food or medicine, are most likely contributing to rising autism rates in kids"
How is this position controversial? By the way, NBC cherry picked "food or medicine...the study he is initiating includes " mold, food additives, pesticides, water, medicines, ultrasound and obesity."
I worry about the effect of drugs on humans! It seems like everyone is juicing with some drug cocktail, SSRI's, anxiety drugs, weed, Adderall, Klonopin, steroids, opiates, T shots, weird designed drugs..we should go back to grog and start over.
@wild chicken, you forgot progesterone. Women are pissing metric tons of their birth control drugs into the environment and there's precious little science being done because it's a cultural and political hand grenade.
"The chances that a glass of tap water in the United States contains water molecules that were once part of a human urine stream are extremely high, likely close to 100%, due to the nature of the water cycle and wastewater treatment processes."
Of course they are. But you didn't say tap water. You said water from waterways. And most of the urine was not streamed into water ways. Very different.
"The chances that a glass of tap water in the United States contains water molecules that were once part of a human urine stream are extremely high, likely close to 100%"
We all have molecules in our lungs that were once in the lungs of Adolf Hitler (or any other historical figure you choose). link
Donald Trump is literally Adolf Hitler!
Reminder that Grok is merely an LLM - a large language model. It's programmed to put words in a certain order. It is NOT programmed to produce "facts."
No, you are not drinking Ann's piss.
We don’t need no dope up salmon.
San Francisco bay salmon, hardest hit.
serious question:
who was the last mass shooter/fire bomber/etc
that WASN'T on SSRIs ?
are we EVER going to face the fact that our current epidemic of insanity is CAUSED by insanity meds?
Funny this thing is coming out now that we have a paranoid anti science Health and Human Services chief.
If the problem is diet… leave the vax regime alone. 🤔
Grok:
"Treated water has extremely low levels of urea (a urine component), on the order of parts per billion or less, after filtration and treatment processes. For an 8-ounce glass, this translates to negligible amounts—far less than a microgram. Water treatment systems, mandated by the EPA, effectively remove or dilute such contaminants.
A microgram is a unit of mass equal to one millionth (1/1,000,000) of a gram, or 0.000001 grams."
So, unless you're drinking water directly out of the Ganges River, you are not drinking people's wee.
And if you are drinking water directly out of the Ganges River, you have far more to worry about than how much piss is in your glass.
"And most of the urine was not streamed into water ways."
I have always assumed that sewage treatment plants eventually output their treated water into surface water ways. Where else could they put it?
As to tap water, I would think whether or not it contains water from urine depends upon whether it comes from surface water or an aquifer.
Your tapwater almost certainly contains water molecules that were once dinosaur piss. That fact belongs in any article that connects wild fish takeup of human prescription drugs with the HHS secretary making an honest effort to understand and resolve the autism epidemic.
I sometimes think they should bring back electroshock therapy and make it compulsory for journalists that write like this. Especially when they use 'without evidence' in the f*cking headline.
“ Kennedy, like so many of his political relatives, is fitting every possible shape through a square hole…”
no, that is what the “scientist” are doing because they only get funding for the square holes if the current paradigm is “square holes”
Kennedy is doing what all politicians in control government funding should be doing: asking questions against the prevailing mode. otherwise the scientist will continue to ask for funding to go down rat holes and then later say “oh wait a minute we had it all wrong”, sm as evidenced by the history of science.
Thanks to Claude, a cousin of Grok:
We're
Intentionally
Thwarting
Honest
Observations,
Undermining
Truths
Everyone
Viscerally
Identifies,
Discrediting
Every
Natural
Conclusion
Effectively
Mount laser on salmon!!
Wait for shark
Ann Althouse said...
A word to the ignorant: "The chances that a glass of tap water in the United States contains water molecules that were once part of a human urine stream are extremely high, likely close to 100%, due to the nature of the water cycle and wastewater treatment processes" (Grok).
That’s fine. If it’s just water molecules, what’s the problem?
As long as Big Fauci Pharma are raking in the big bucks - along with their cronies in the Government - it's all cool.
If the objection was to my use of the word waterways, I’ve changed it to water supply
If it's not threatening the health of the species (just as many salmon are making it to the ocean), then I don't care about that. But I do care that it's in our drinking water. We don't really know what it's doing to us. There's much more to my life than just making it to the sea.
if water from human urine gets into the tapwater, there’s a risk that the drugs are there too
The stock answer to the question I’m raising is just an assurance that it must be in a very low concentration, but I don’t find that sufficiently reassuring, especially with the questions that RFK Junior is raising
Side note: An Italian great-great-grandfather came to Cincinnati and worked at the water works for some time before taking the family back to Europe. Except one daughter, his only child born outside Cincinnati, stayed behind.
The Cincinnati Water Works are the oldest public water works in the state of Ohio when the City bought out a private water works in 1839. We’ve had to deal with Pittsburgh’s shit for a long time.
I have questions about the Salmon.
Like how much clobozam is in the water generally, and how much were they given in the experiment?
Is the difference parts per billion vs. parts per thousand?
Also being a salmon is a pretty risky thing to begin with. A risk-taking salmon is sort of like a tall basketball player.
And are they proposing that the salmon do yoga and breathing exercises instead?
Rocco said...That’s fine. If it’s just water molecules, what’s the problem?
The problem is it's not just water molecules. You have microplastics in your brain, you have progesterone in your tap water. All the chemicals pumped out by our factories are in our environment, being eaten, drunk, or breathed in by us and by the things we eat.
While my wife was not a salmon, she too had adverse reaction to anti-anxiety meds. She was the worrying sort and several doctors had tried to prescribe anti-anxiety drugs but the tended to make her MORE anxious. The modern medical-pharmacology complex is effed up I don't know how much headway RJK Jr. will be able to make in four short years.
Anyway, who still dumps these drugs down the drain? Or is it like the birth control hormones where the are excreted and retain potency while in the water?
Gay frogs and Columbia U hardest hit!
end ital
...Scientists, leave those fish alone!
Roger Waters, please call your office!
Of course they are. But you didn't say tap water. You said water from waterways. And most of the urine was not streamed into water ways. Very different.
Dude! Where do you think treated wastewater goes after leaving the sewage plant? Yes the ocean and underground aquifers, but think hard, HOW does water get to the ocean? And to the aquifers?
Tim. Thanks for fixing it.
I'm generally very skeptical of whatever the environmental health claim du jour may be, and I generally agree that the levels of pharmaceutical products in drinking water are low enough that they aren't a major worry. That said, I do think the door is open for legitimate concerns about the impact of years of chronic exposure to low level contamination. I'd say that also is true for the question of environmental exposure of fish to pharmaceuticals, but environmental science is so politicized and corrupt that believable research is hard to find.
Speaking of politicized research, I haven't quite kept up with the field, but the last time I looked into causes of autism (maybe five years ago), there were only a handful of clear signals associated with autism, once you set aside how changes in testing rates and the diagnostic criteria determine what actually gets called "autism."
As I recall, genetics and paternal age were, by far, the most strongly and credibly associated with autism risk, with maternal pharmacology a little lower. Nearly all other factors were much lower or didn't have enough evidence to be convincing.
Regarding FormerLawClerk's reminder "that Grok is merely an LLM - a large language model. It's programmed to put words in a certain order. It is NOT programmed to produce 'facts'", that is very important to remember. I recently needed to produce a bunch of one-page synopses of matters I had first-hand experience with, and I decided to see if LLMs might speed the process. The LLMs produced output that was perfectly formatted, surprisingly well-written, and, for the most part, directionally correct. Unfortunately, nearly every specific "fact" from the LLMs ranged from being not quite accurate to being fully misleading. If I didn't have first-hand knowledge of the subject and not fact-checked, I would have published inaccurate data, further polluting the data that AIs use to generate new content. In one case, an LLM said that Person A did something that Person B actually did. The reason was that source material about Person B had one paragraph quoting Person A describing what Person B did without mentioning Person B by name. The LLM incorrectly extrapolated that the source paragraph was about Person A, not Person B. If I had published that result, it would have made it more likely that future AIs would make incorrect statements. (This phenomenon is called "model collapse" for people who want to learn more.)
If you want to get into the details, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water are constantly rearranging themselves, so an actual water molecule doesn't last very long. But some of those drugs are quite stable. The question of their concentration in your tapwater depends upon its source. But plenty of cities take their water from rivers, downstream from other cities.
"aren't we, the humans, ultimately drinking that water?"
...
No. Nobody is drinking your piss. Sheesh, woman. Get a grip.
...
The chances that a glass of tap water in the United States contains water molecules that were once part of a human urine stream are extremely high, likely close to 100%"
...
Your tapwater almost certainly contains water molecules that were once dinosaur piss.
Dude, she's right here. And she's remarkably youthful and vigorous for her age.
We need to ask the Fremen of Arrakkis how their stillsuits work.
"Unfortunately, nearly every specific "fact" from the LLMs ranged from being not quite accurate to being fully misleading."
I've been trying to explain this to our hostess for some time now, apparently without much success. Getting your facts from AI is like getting your facts from movies.
FormerLawClerk said...
No. Nobody is drinking your piss. Sheesh, woman. Get a grip.
"Nobody"? Here's a WaPo headline for you:
Former Law Clerk claims — without evidence — that "nobody" is drinking Althouse's piss.
slash b.
Kennedy says that environmental exposures, such as food or medicine, are most likely contributing to rising autism rates in kids"
While I don't doubt that exposure to the multitudes of chemicals in our food and pervasive in most environments is not good for us. And that the chemicals should be removed or better regulated. BUT....... Something else is more likely for the statistic of "rising autism rates"
Over diagnosis and expanding the range of activities/symptoms that can classify someone as Autistic or being in "the Spectrum" of Autism, Asperger Syndrome etc. In the olden days....(my youth) A kid who was quirky, overly interested in niche things, obsessed with math/music/insects was was considered just that. Quirky, weird, nerdy, unusual and he/she would probably grow out of it.
YES there were severe cases of autism but those were rare. Now anyone who exibits a difficult personality or is the quirky kid...gets classified Autistic, Attention deficit etc etc etc ect. and likely doped to the gills.
It is like the big Covid scam, where everyone who had just a common cold or seasonal flu....was classified as having covid. Die in an auto accident with a cold....it was classified as a COVID death...increasing the statistics.
Myself and my brother were the weird, quirky kids. Brother didn't speak words/sentences until he was over the age of 3. The doctor said...when he had something to say he would...and he did. (I on the other hand spoke at age one and never shut the F up 😁) He and I could both read by the age of 2 Nothing came of it. Parents just let us be to follow our own specific interests.. We coped. Today as children.....we would be classified, likely, Asperger Syndrome. Medicated, prodded, worried, put into therapy and never allowed to be weird kids.
Mark Twain said. "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics". The persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments
If not in the water, where else could it be?
Rocco said, "We need to ask the Fremen of Arrakkis how their stillsuits work."
"Whatever you do, Usul, avoid the brown sand." - Stilgar
Rocco's comment and all this pee talk made me think of the piss-pipes we used to use in Iraq. They solve several problems:
- Sequester potentially toxic waste underground...c'mon you can't tell me carbon sequestration enviorwackos wouldn't love this.
- There are documented examples of them being mistaken by enemy observers as mortar positions and shelled. Yes...you have to rebuild your latrine but at least no one got hurt.
- It feels good peeing on the land of countries you despise. They treat their desert countries like giant landfills, so when in Rome...
- Boys can be messy, but the janitorial overhead on pisspipes is incredibly low.
All we need is a lady's version and culture-wide adoption and abracadabra the salmon are saved!
"Former Law Clerk claims — without evidence — that "nobody" is drinking Althouse's piss."
Next best thing to female panther piss...is what they say...but harder to get.
Someone famously said...
Watch out where the Huskies go, don't you eat the yellow snow.
The two trillion pounds of animal waste generated by large-scale poultry and livestock operations in this country is laced with hormones and antibiotics fed to animals to make them grow faster and to keep them from getting sick. Inevitably, some of those hormones and antibiotics leach into groundwater or get into waterways.
Anyone got a ink to the full study? Some of the claims don't make sense.
Maybe that's why we're seeing all these UAP's coming out the ocean in recent years, anti-anxiety meds in the water and the fish they eat are affecting the aliens' usual sober judgement and discretion. Anyway, that's what I think.
Just because the molecules were detected in salmon there should be no, ahem, Rushdie to judgment.
Any possibility that all the Viagra that's being excreted is causing salmon to become sex crazed and causing them to take risks in order to go upstream to spawn?
Maybe it's just giving them all a stiff neck.
RideSpaceMountain, wouldn't those piss pipes concentrate the urine / phosphorus and lead to explosive conditions?
Just to throw a spanner into the works 'cause that's the kind of mood I'm in, changes in the environment is how we got from wolves to dogs. Gene expression changes with the environment. And that new gene expression is inheritable. Lots of lovely new ideas to explore. All those drugs in the food supply could lead anywhere.
@Christy, yes, refining urea properly for purity and size is a great source of nitrate, but it is usually only explosive when combined with other fun chemicals. They're not dangerous but they can be disgusting, especially after direct hits that spray urine-soaked sand all over the FOB.
I *do* wonder how all the different synthetic hormones that drugged-up humans excrete affect animals, but it's a question of concentration. Did the salmon receive the drugs in any concentration near to what they experience in Nature?
Almost 30% of all autism cases can be identified by a genetic test for chromosomal abnormalities. This is not new technology, and has been present for almost 15 years.
Additional investigation into genome analysis using AI or other programs that can analyze meta data will most likely identify more markers.
Definitions will be important, too. Are Fragile X or Rett Syndrome (other genetic issues) considered autism? That too has a test.
How far down the spectrum we define as pure autism compared with more behavioral diagnosis will be another factor - especially Aspersers.
It is not vaccines, mercury (which was removed in 2011) pesticides, food dye. It is a medical issue.
There is one theory about an autoimmune reaction to a virus which attacks neurological factors. This would be similar to the autoimmune reaction causes Type 1 diabetes, MS, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. They all that impacts children randomly early in development.
Pharmaceuticals are digested and so what is excreted is parts of the molecules called metabolites or markers. Things such as metals, pass thru as is. The levels of detection are very low, so contaminants in the parts per billion range can be identified. Because something is present, doesn't mean it can impact you. Examples include: Opiate metabolites can be detected at 100 parts per billion.
Head meds can cause hypersexuality, which can be risky.
"Salmon given antianxiety drugs take more risks, study finds."
The algorithms push videos at me of risky idiots doing risky idiot things on bikes. Given the headline above, maybe a fish really does need a bicycle.
Some of the residents of Puget Sound country are completely immune from this risk. The city of Tacoma, for example, gets its water from the Green River, which comes from rain and snowfall on the western slope of the Cascades, runs through a completely restricted watershed where there might be bare deer and raccoon poop and urine coming in to the water, but no medicated people or domesticated medicated animals are upstream of that. I think Seattle has a similar arrangement.
And the water itself, being rainfall, has already gone through God's magnificent water distillery (evaporation) so it starts out pretty pure. All this talk does make me happy I don't live in a place like Los Angeles or New Orleans, for sure.
Didn't Captain Kirk defeat Gorn using black powder made using the nitrates in Gorn piss?
Jeez, Wince. I thought my joke was lame.
I'd hate to be a fish off the coast of Manhattan, or Brooklyn, San Francisco, or especially Los Angeles.
70% of salmon is farm raised.
Did USAID fund this study?
Kamikaze salmon smolt go through the turbines in the hydropower dams.
"...It must be in a very low concentration". I wonder what else is in that water in (nearly) the same concentration. It's probably a long list.
Grok estimated it to be: Aluminum (Al),Ammonia (NH3/NH4+),Anthropogenic Organic Compounds,Antimony (Sb),Arsenic (As),Barium (Ba),Beryllium (Be),Boron (B),Cadmium (Cd),Chloride (Cl-),Chromium (Cr),Cobalt (Co),Copper (Cu),Fluoride (F-),Iron (Fe),Lead (Pb),Manganese (Mn),Molybdenum (Mo),Nickel (Ni),Nitrate (NO3-),Organo-metallic Complexes,Phosphate (PO43-),Rare Earth Elements (REEs),Selenium (Se),Silica (SiO2),Silver (Ag),Strontium (Sr),Sulfate (SO42-),Thallium (Tl),Titanium (Ti),Uranium (U),Vanadium (V),Zinc (Zn)
"Tina848 said...
Almost 30% of all autism cases can be identified by a genetic test for chromosomal abnormalities."
I question that. So far as I know there is no test for autism. There's tests which sometimes identify it when it's there and sometimes identify it when it's not there and sometimes don't identify it when it is there. Often the test is for somethng else like Fragile X syndrome which has its own problems. Genetic tests for autism are just unreliable. When you think about it, it's quite improbable that a gene for autism has increased in the population from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 35.
I wonder what research you are referring, too.
Democrat media BUZZ-PHRASE
WITHOUT EVIDENCE!
There was no evidence that Covid came from a wet-maket - but that didn't stop the Democxrat Party press from pushing that LIE.
I have a nephew who is severely autistic. He was diagnosed at a young age – when his parents noticed that he would not make eye contact, and he would never laugh, giggle or engage.
He is not merely quirky. He is 20 years old, going on 6. every day.
He is nonverbal, he requires 24/7 care, and he behaves like a naughty child -most of the time.
He assembles pizza boxes a few times a week at a local pizza shop. That’s about all he will ever be able to do.
I might list some of his behaviors later.
He is in a school program until age 21 for special needs. Over the past 2 decades, I've been to many school presentations -like a play for instance - where the whole cast is developmentally challenged children. I was always amazed seeing the variety of parents. Also, I was stunned to see how many children were severely developmentally challenged.
Anyway - the children were a mix of autism, down-syndrome and others..
Autism is real. My nephew's autism has nothing to do with attention deficit disorder.
This is a wonderful local charity.
Can autistic people go on dates or play sports? It depends who you ask.
'RFK Jr. Says People with Autism 'Will Never Pay Taxes, Hold a Job, Go on a Date,' Sparking Fierce Backlash"
Left untreated, autism can cause dangerously antisocial behavior including dumping bears in Central Park, mulching animals in a blender, fondling babysitters, and injecting massive amounts of heroin. /s
ildswan said...
"I question that."
So do (or did) I.
Grock was pretty convincing, though I didn't venture to look more closely at any of the assertions.
My prompt:
Is there any scientific (physical mechanism) or empirical evidence to support the basis for the idea that autism exists on a spectrum? Is it anything more than a spectrum of severity? In any case, what fact exists linking the least severe and most severe autism? Is it equally arguable that they are two different, unrelated things?
This link contains two previous prompts/responses. Scroll down to read the response to the autism prompt.
Grok response https://x.com/i/grok/share/9JID2lvKMibgWq9SV0CokNGhU
Kakappoodel(D) - you prove that you know nothing about autism.
Kakapoodle - what about murdering Jeffrey Epstein, spooge on a blue dress, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private jets for a BS oligarchy tour, allowing 11+ million illegals into the us and FORCING tax payer dollars to fund them?
Antifa riots, Bombing Tesla dealerships on high command from, the top of the Democratic party?
Scott Patton - yes the spectrum is the same thing as levels of severity.
Althouse, you deviously, lawyerly, and unsubtly conflated the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water molecules - water which is not only harmless but healthy when consumed in normal amounts, with the many components of urine, which few people favor drinking at all for reasons of rational hygiene and prurient distaste. Your comment is a "True Scotsman" type of fallacy, not worthy of anyone but a lawyer! And I say that, having in my lifetime certainly inhaled atoms that were farted by ancient Romans, an example of the same sort that a Chem prof once offered to an entire class of impressionably naive youth.
So let's list a few moments when contact or drinking urine was in the public eye.
On the old crime soap opera, Hill Street Blues, the female DA once confronted a survivalist who challenged her to describe surviving a car breakdown in a desert. She included, in her steps to survive, saving her urine to drink, earning the trust of the perp and disgusting everyone else.
Prime Minister of India 1977-79, Moraji Desai, is famous for his enconium of urine as a healthy beverage. The Carter Era was strange for everyone.
Google AI tells me - and I'll erase my search history after this - that Bear Grylls supports drinking urine for survival purposes, boxer Juan Manuel Marquez drinks urine for perceived nutritional benefits during training, and British actor Sarah Miles claims to drink urine daily for allergy relief.
So there you go. Lawerly arguments in bad faith are noxious.
@Peachy — I have a great nephew who is 5yr old autistic non-verbal.
Toxicity of a molecule is related to the dosage and the time of exposure. Coverage of environmental nanodoses tends toward alarmism.
RFK Jr believes pollution causes autism. That is why we are gutting the EPA. 🤡
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.