|
|
Columns::April 15, 2002
The Golden Arch
Two-day statewide symposium highlights undergraduate research
Magazine ranks business, law, education among nation’s best
Four candidates for deanship to visit campus
Annual children’s literature conference opens April 18
Charleston mayor to discuss downtown preservation
Team-building ‘eggs-cellence’
Making media a method
Teaching students is ‘elementary’ for mathematics education prof
Rick Watson, MIS professor, named Internet Strategy chairholder
Newsmakers
In the swim
Campus News
 |
| Marsha Black, an environmental health scientist in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, will test for the presence of antidepressant drugs after wastewater treatment. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
Testing the waters
New study examines levels of prescription drugs in the state’s waterways
By Brad Haire
bhaire@uga.edu
Prescription drug use is on the rise in the United States. As a result, you might be surprised to learn what’s in your local river or drinking water, says Marsha Black, an environmental health scientist with UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
A new study in the college is designed to find out just how much of a certain type of drug is in Georgia’s waterways, says Black. Along with Kevin Armbrust, a colleague formerly at UGA, Black will look for five popular antidepressants known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The more familiar brand names are Prozac, Luvox, Paxil, Celexa and Zoloft.
SRRIs have been available only for the past few years. They’re effective in treating a number of conditions, such as depression, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder and premenstrual syndrome.
The Environmental Protection Agency has become very interested in these drugs, Black says. SRRIs have a lot in common with chemicals like pesticides that are known to be present in and toxic to the environment. If you use a sensitive enough instrument and look in the right direction, she says, you can find these chemicals.
“Evidence from Europe says it’s getting in the drinking water,” Black says. “Europe is light years ahead of us [on this research].”
How do such drugs get into the environment?
“They’re excreted by the people taking them therapeutically,” she says.
The drug is carried in human waste through the sewerage system to wastewater treatment plants. Then the treated water is discharged into the environment.
Sometimes the drug passes through the body in its original form or in some broken-down form. Sometimes, when an organism metabolizes a drug, a glucose molecule may get attached. With the attached glucose, the drug can pass through the system more quickly. When it gets into the environment, the glucose molecule can be lost. That leaves the original drug loose in the environment.
But little is known about how these drugs affect the environment in the United States. Black hopes to change that. She’ll put these drugs through a battery of environmental tests in the lab, much like the way pesticides and other chemicals are tested.
Black will work with the wastewater treatment facility in a city in Georgia. She’ll test water samples before and after the wastewater treatment to find out if and how much of the drugs are present. Then she’ll compare that to the amount of SRRI drugs in that area.
The study may show that these drugs degrade quickly in the environment and should be of no concern. Or it may prove that there is a public safety issue here that needs to be addressed, she says.
Her research has already shown Prozac to be deadly in the parts-per-billion range to water fleas, a small microcrustacean widely used to study water quality. This is reason for concern, Black says.
The study will be conducted over the next three years with a $500,000 EPA grant.
|
|
|
|
|
