EMERGING CONCERNS - Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 122

painkillers, and other medications, while personal care prod-
ucts include soaps, fragrances, sunscreen, and cosmetics. Even
caffeine (in food and beverages as well as some pharmaceu-
ticals) has been found in coastal waters. There are mounting
concerns about pharmaceuticals that are being found wherever
they have been looked for in waterbodies. There are several
reasons for the concern. Large quantities of pharmaceuticals
and personal care products (PPCPs) enter the environment
after use, and sewage systems are not equipped to remove
them. Most treatment plants filter and chlorinate sewage to
remove disease-causing microbes and excess organic matter
but do not remove pharmaceuticals, which go right through
traditional treatment processes. When treatment plants release
treated sewage (effluent), drug-tainted water is released
directly into the receiving waterbody. Researchers such as
Daughton and Kearns have found antibiotics, blood-pressure
reducers, hormones, psychiatric drugs, and painkillers in the
water leaving sewage plants and in the waterbodies receiving
this wastewater. The risks posed to aquatic organisms and to
humans are unknown, because the concentrations are so low.
Since pharmaceuticals are designed to have biological effects
at very low concentrations, it is not surprising that they should
have effects on aquatic organisms. Two of the major concerns
about pharmaceutical pollution have been the development
of resistance to antibiotics by microbes and endocrine dis-
ruption by natural and synthetic sex steroids (such as birth
control pills). Many other PPCPs have unknown effects. These
contaminants are being discovered in water and fish tissue at
very low concentrations. It is likely they have been present in
the environment for as long as they have been in use. Many
PPCPs remain in the water because as they degrade more are
continually being added, and their use is increasing. Because
of increasing concentrations, environmental effects are being
noticed.
When endocrine disruption was first being studied in
aquatic animals in the early 1990s, people looked to the