NFP is for hippies!

Guess what? I knew this, but maybe more people would like to know:

NFP can save your planet! It's the green thing to do!

And, by the way, there is an article today on yahoo news about how amphibians are dying at alarming rates these days. They are like a canary in the coal mine, they tell you when we should pay attention, because we might be next... Huh, wasn't there a movie about this? Oh, yeah, "Children of Men". Good flick, very sad. Maybe it was estrogen that made the whole world infertile, but they were in so much denial that they never figured it out.

Estrogen in water 'feminizes' fish, lake study finds
Even small amounts decimate population

Tom Spears
The Ottawa Citizen; CanWest News Service

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Estrogen that goes down Canadian toilets -- some naturally from women, some from birth control pills -- is enough to make an entire fish species too feminine to reproduce, a seven-year Canadian study shows.

Fish scientist Karen Kidd dripped small amounts of estrogen into a clean lake in northwestern Ontario over several years, just as if urine with the female hormone were running in via sewage from a nearby city.

This constant hormone bath made male minnows produce eggs in unnatural, part-female sex organs.

Even after she stopped adding estrogen and the water was clean again, the minnows almost completely disappeared for several years.

Even small concentrations of estrogen can decimate wild fish populations, the University of New Brunswick biology professor concludes, even at levels found in some Canadian waters.

While the minnows were prone to fast extinction because of their short lifespan, Kidd says bigger fish could suffer a similar fate if they were exposed long enough. As well, she said, minnows are important as a food source for bigger fish.

"A lot of our pollution regulations tend to be centred around chemicals that are persistent in the environment and accumulate in fish," she said. These include pesticides, such as DDT and industrial PCB oils, which last for years.

Estrogen doesn't last long, but it, too, needs control, Kidd said. "We don't know a whole lot about the concentration of these compounds in our waters."

The bacteria in a modern sewage plant chew up estrogen effectively, but Kidd said the biggest concern is for rivers and water systems that receive untreated sewage. She said her city, Saint John, N.B., still sends 40 per cent of its sewage untreated into streams and, ultimately, the Bay of Fundy. The city recently obtained federal funds to treat all its sewage in a few years.

The first news of "feminized" fish came from British rivers in the 1990s. Male fish near sewage plants were producing eggs and carrying reproductive organs that were partly female.

"A lot of followup studies showed it was the natural estrogens that women excrete and then the synthetic estrogens in birth control pills that were the main causes of feminization in male fish," Kidd said. "The pill is one of the most heavily prescribed pharmaceuticals in the world. There are over a million women on it in Canada."

Kidd chose an unpolluted lake with healthy fish to learn what damage estrogen would cause.

Male minnows in water with estrogen stopped looking male. Where they should have distinct colours and bumps at spawning time, they didn't have any visible sign of maleness.

"And then when you opened them up, their testes were much smaller than they should have been" -- about one-third the normal size. By the third year of adding estrogen to the lake, the testes had ovary-type tissue and were producing eggs -- a condition called "intersex."

It's exactly what scientists had seen in the wild. Kidd's achievement is in reproducing this effect in a previously clean lake, proving that estrogen is the cause. "That was the big question: What does it mean for the fish population? We've shown that it has profound effects on the fathead minnow."

The last estrogen in Kidd's study went into the lake in 2003. Since then, bacteria and sunlight have broken it down and the water has returned to normal.

The minnow population, however, took a further two years to recover.

The seven-year study, funded by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the American Chemistry Council, is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
© The Edmonton Journal 2007