Mussels off Seattle coast are ingesting your opiate-laced pooh

[fleur-de-lisa]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mussels-test-positive-for-opioids-seattle-puget-sound/?ftag=CNM-00-10aac3a

As more and more American communities grapple with opioid addiction, the human toll of the epidemic has grown in both scope and severity. And now, scientists at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that drug's impact has literally flowed downstream to affect marine life, as well. Specifically, they used mussels as a barometer of pollution in the waters off Seattle, and discovered that oxycodone is now present enough in the marine environment there for shellfish to test positive.

Since mussels are "filter feeders," they absorb contaminants from their environment into their tissues in a concentrated way. Scientists used cages to transplant clean mussels from an aquaculture source on Whidbey Island to 18 urbanized locations around Puget Sound. Several months later, they pulled those previously uncontaminated mussels back out of the urban waters and, together with the Puget Sound Institute, tested them again.

In three of the 18 locations, the mussels then tested positive for trace amounts of oxycodone. How, you ask?

When humans ingest opioids like oxycodone, they ultimately end up excreting traces of the drugs into the toilet. Those chemicals then end up in wastewater. And while many contaminants are filtered out of wastewater before it's released into the oceans, wastewater management systems can't entirely filter out drugs. Thus, opioids, antidepressants, the common chemotherapy drug Melphalan -- the mussels tested positive for all of them.

Link to tweet

[samnsara]

1. i used to live on beautiful tranquil Whidbey Island but i never ate Ocean Phlegm!

[pandr32]

2. Crab and clams must be contaminated, too

...along with oysters. After reading about farmed fish and how bad that is to eat I am seriously considering dropping seafood. Blech!

[fleur-de-lisa]

3. I understand. I live in Louisiana. I am certain that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico

is still contaminated from the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.

I wonder which is worse . . . crude oil-laced seafood, opiate-laced seafood, or farmed fish?

[LisaM]

4. And nuclear waste from Fukushima is on the way, too.

I live in Seattle, but don't eat seafood, luckily.

It used to be that the biggest worry for water contamination was mercury. We have got to stop spilling this stuff into our oceans and lakes (I've also heard that zinc from sunscreen is a problem....)

[pandr32]

9. There are also reports of mutations in fish in the Pacific

[SeattleVet]

5. Pretty much all of the area is closed to shellfishing...

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has a good map showing where it is OK to harvest shellfish:

https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/eh/maps/biotoxin/biotoxin.html

For many years they have been detecting pretty much anything that people put into their bodies, and that water treatment plants cannot remove. During late October through December there is a huge spike in cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice in the water and the filter feeders, due to all of the pumpkin pie spice flavored coffee drinks and other foods. Caffeine is always present at relatively high levels, as are birth control pills. Metabolites of THC and CBD are being seen in slightly elevated levels.

If you put it into your body, it will become detectable at some level in the water (and filter feeding marine organisms).

[Blues Heron]

6. Gotta pay extra for that lol

twofer

"tonight?"
"yeah, Mussels and chill"
"you mean Netflix?"
"no. Puget Mussels"

[marylandblue]

7. So what happens when mussels get high?

Do they start crawling aimlessly around the seafloor muttering to themselves? Or do they head straight for the sewer outfall, looking for their next fix?

[fleur-de-lisa]

8. LOL! Good questions.

Since we are talking aobut Seattle, surely there is marijuana in that pooh as well.

Maybe they still live at home, occasionally wandering over to the pier to scavenge for Dorito droppings.

[mr_lebowski]

10. Not just poop it's also from pee (probably mostly actually). Wonder if they test for actual OC or

the metabolites of oxycodone? Many 'drug tests' given to humans are in fact tests for presence of known metabolites of the drugs, not the drugs themselves.

The body does a pretty damn good job of metabolizing oxycontin and most other opioids thus I suspect that when they say 'testing positive' they mean for the metabolites, not for the presence of the drug itself within the shellfish's tissues.

[Ligyron]

11. IDK, they sure look happy to me.

[bornfree17]

12. for those who

take drug test for work can they blame it on the mussels?