REDUCED SPERM COUNT - ITS NOT MARIJUANA!

Excerpt from "The Lost Language of Plants" by Stephen Harrod Buhner

THE TRUE CULPRIT

All manufactured drugs end up in both water and soil. Each excreted drug is (usually) heavily diluted by these mediums, generally being found in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb), or parts per trillion (ppt). Present in measurable quantities in most rivers, streams, lakes, and commercial water supplies, they reach the highest levels in the effluent streams coming from waste treatment plants. And they do have measurable effects.

For example, Chris Metcalf, a researcher at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, detected estrone (a type of estrogen) levels in waste-water effluent up to 400 ppt and the synthetic hormone ethinylestra-diol (from birth control pills) up to 14 ppt. (He found anticancer agents, psychiatric drugs, and anti-inflammatory compounds as well.) Metcalf exposed Japanese medakas (a type of fish) for 100 days to concentrations typical of wastewater streams. At concentrations of 0.1 ppt of ethinylestradiol and 10 ppt estrone the fish began to exhibit intersexual changes (showing both male and female characteristics). At 1,000 ppt all the males transformed into females.

Male fish possess a gene that, in the presence of even ppt of estrogen, will produce vitellogenin. Vitellogenin is a protein found in female fish that is responsible for making the yolk in their eggs. Male trout, caged and placed by English researchers in lakes where wastewater effluent streams discharged, showed—after only two to three weeks' exposure—increased levels of vitellogenin in their blood. Researchers near London had become alerted to the problem when they began finding male fish whose testes were loaded with eggs.20 In Canada, Metcalf has found intersex white perch in the Great Lakes near Ontario. And American researchers have found that male walleyes living in effluent streams have quit producing sperm while male carp are showing slowed sperm motility.21

Abnormal reproductive development has also been found in alligators and birth defects in birds—all traced to estrogen or similar endocrine disrupting chemicals.21 Concern about the pervasiveness of reproductive- and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment has become so high that on May 30, 1996, an international panel of scientists issued The Erice Report—a joint statement of alarm about the potential long-term effects of these disrupters in the environment. The report notes that "in contrast to natural hormones found in animals and plants, some of the components and by-products of many manufactured organic compounds that interfere with the endocrine system are persistent and undergo biomagnification in the food web, which makes them of greater concern as endocrine disruptors."2i

Estrogens such as Premarin and synthetic hormones from birth control pills are one of the most commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals in the industrialized world. Nine million women in the United States take some form of estrogen daily for menopause symptom relief.24 A large number of other pollutants that act as estrogen-like compounds are also present in the environment. They come from medical waste such as phthalates and dioxins, PCBs, and some pesticides. Estrogens are also present in naturally occurring forms in the environment, usually generated by plants (phytoestrogens). There is evidence that all these estrogens and estrogen mimics can combine together and act synergistically, producing marked effects at extremely low levels—levels that cannot be predicted from a simple addition of their presence in the environment.25

Given this deluge of estrogens, it should be noted that physicians have been perplexed by reduced sperm counts and slower sperm motil-ity in American men for some time. And researchers have been perplexed as well by the younger and younger ages at which American girls are entering puberty. The average age of puberty for girls one hundred years ago was eleven. Now it is less than ten in Caucasians, less than nine in African Americans. It is not unusual to find girls as young as six or seven developing breast buds or pubic hair and i percent of all girls now show signs of puberty by age three.26 Obese children, whose fat may be concentrating estrogenic chemicals in greater amounts, have been found to be entering puberty younger than thin children.27 Rising breast and uterine cancers have also been perplexing; evidence has linked those kinds of cancers (the largest category of cancers among women) to estrogens as well.

Estrogens and birth control pills are, of course, not the only phar-maceuticals accumulating in the environment. In Germany, Thomas Ternes has found up to i ppb of carbamazepine—an anticonvulsive drug—and 2.4 ppb of iodine-based drugs used to improve x-ray contrast—so-called Diagnostic Contrast Media. And newer drugs, such as cellular-pump (efflux) inhibitors used to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria, are showing up in increasing amounts as well.

Cellular-pump inhibitors prevent bacteria from ejecting antibiotics from within themselves by impeding their cellular pumping mechanisms. But all life-forms use cellular pumping to rid themselves of toxins. Anything that interferes with cellular pumping could result in any life-form being unable to remove toxins from its cells.28 Some evidence that this is actually occurring in the environment has already been found.

In the past decade it has been discovered that many aquatic organisms, especially bottom feeders and filter feeders (for example, shrimp, flounders, oysters), possess a special excretory system called the multi-xenobiotic transport system (MTS). It is composed of proteins (such as Pgp) that facilitate the removal of toxic substances from inside their cells. Because of their nature, filter feeders and bottom feeders encounter large numbers of toxins in their diet. These types of aquatic dwellers depend heavily on the MTS, otherwise toxics would build up to deadly levels in their bodies.

The MTS system is nonspecific: it recognizes many pesticides, drugs, and natural toxins alike as substances that need to be sequestered and removed.29 Drugs such as verapamil (a cardiac calcium ion influx inhibitor) directly bind to the receptor cite of Pgp thus limiting the effectiveness of the MTS system and its cellular pumping mechanisms. As a result, at lower levels, toxins have become more dangerous to many aquatic organisms. Daughton and Ternes note that "exposure to verapamil at micromolar concentrations and lower greatly increases the toxicity of a number of drugs or other xenobiotics for many aquatic organisms as the toxicant cannot be readily removed from the exposed organism."3° Other drugs that have been shown to inhibit the MTS include reserpine (antihypertensive), trifluoro-perazine (antipsychotic tranquilizer), cyclosporins (immunosuppres-sants), quinidine and amiodarone (antiarrythmics), anthracyclines (noncytotoxic cytoxin analogs), and progesterone (steroid).3'

Other drugs, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors "(SSRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, and Paxil, have exceptionally strong impacts on aquatic organisms as well—even in tiny amounts of parts per billion. Serotonin is important in invertebrate and vertebrate ner- j vous systems but it also plays key roles in the physiologic regulatory activities of many organisms. Among shellfish serotonin regulates reproductive activities (such as spawning, egg maturation, and hatching), heartbeat rhythm, feeding, biting, swimming patterns, cilia movement, and larval metamorphosis. Among crustaceans it stimulates the release of many different neurohormones that affect such things as glucose uptake, shell color, molting, egg maturation, and levels of neuroactivity.

Some commercial shellfish farmers have long added serotonin to their crops to stimulate spawning. Researchers, however, have found that Prozac and Luvox are the most potent such compounds ever produced, having significant effects at parts per billion levels. Extremely low doses of Prozac initiated significant spawning activity in mussels, while Luvox was even stronger, needing several magnitudes of dosage less to produce effects. SSRIs have been found to significantly affect fingernail clams, mussels, fiddler crabs, crayfish, snails, squids, and lobsters with wide-ranging effects at extremely low doses. SSRIs such as Prozac are some of the most widely dispensed drugs in the industrialized nations. And still other drugs have been found to affect crustacean reproduction as well.

Fenfluramine, a sympathomimetic amine once popularly prescribed as a diet drug (removed from the market in 1998 because of heart valve damage in patients), has also shown strong reproductive system activity in crustaceans at low doses: It triggers ovary-stimulating hormones in crayfish and gonad-stimulating hormones in male fiddler crabs. And retinoids, prescribed in large quantities for such things as acne (Accutane), cancers such as leukemia (Vesanoid), and wrinkles (Retin-A or tretinoin, an antiaging prescription and a widely prescribed drug in the U.S.), have been shown to have profound effects on amphibian embryonic systems. Constant exposure can produce deformities in the offspring of frogs and other amphibians.32