Ever higher levels of pharmaceutical drugs are turning up in drinking water supplies, and an op-ed in the UK Mirror discusses a study that looked at what happened to birds when they were given comparable levels of antidepressants in their water.
“Researchers fed starlings worms and water that had been treated with fluoxetine – a dose of 0.92 micrograms per day,” the article reports. “That’s the level the scientists estimated that birds were exposed to in the wild. They then recorded the starlings’ behaviour. They found that the birds that were on antidepressants didn’t eat as much, lost weight, and also lost interest in potential mates.”
What’s in our water? (Mirror, October 27, 2014)
