GOD
Holofractale de l'hypervérité
- Inscrit
- 14/1/06
- Messages
- 14 944
"Our least precious bodily fluid may just tell the tale of our collective taste for illicit drugs, if a new technique for sampling sewage for evidence of their use proves effective. Scient ist s have developed methods for isolating the byproducts of drug use that are excreted in urine. Sewage waters can be considered as a diluted, pooled urine sample,explains toxicologist Roberto Fanelli of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, whose group has employed mass spectrometry to analyze wastewater in urban rivers. The chemical target of Fanelli’s study was benzoylecgonine what the body turns cocaine into after the drug has done its brain-altering business. We found that, sampling the Po River on different days in different months, the river carried the equivalent of about four kilograms of cocaine every day . Environmental chemist Jennifer Field of Oregon State University and her colleagues have used liquid chromatography with similar results. Here’s a new tool for taking snapshots of communities over space and in time and getting a less biased view of drug use than would be obtained from traditional phone surveys, she says.Already such snapshots have been taken of London, Milan and a wide range of communities of varying sizes in the U.S. including Corvallis, Oregon State’s home town. The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has taken an interest, running a pilot project in 2006 to test such methodologies in 24 facilities surrounding Washington, D.C. We think if this can be shown to be reliable, it has value, says David Murray, chief scientist for the Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center at the ONDCP. We know how many metric tons of cocaine are produced in the Andes, we know how many we seize on the open seas, but we don’t know how many metric tons are consumed.The ONDCP has no plans for further testing at this point, but both the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency may pursue it. Sewage-sampling techniques, which can be applied to almost any drug, prescription or illicit, might be most useful in broadly identifying those strata of society who typically do not self-report recreational drug use or end up in the statistics kept by public drug abuse treatment facilities. People have an incentive to tell government pollsters they don’t use illegal drugs when asked,says Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug law reform advocacy group. The techniques could not, however, pinpoint actual individual drug users. To get data from individuals, one should track samples close to the source at the time of toilet flushing, which is practically impossible,Fanelli says.Having a broad view of chemical use could provide insight into how best to target limited drug treatment resources or to enable, for the first time, true comparisons between levels of drug use from city to city. It also might reveal the effectiveness or lack thereof of particular antidrug efforts. If law enforcement believes that they have eradicated the source of a substance for a community, this would be one way to verify those possibilities, says Wilson Compton, who is the director of NIDA’s Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research. Requests for such overall pictures are pouring in, according to researchers, from government facilities such as prisons and national labs to major cities. In November, Field and her colleagues took a snapshot of the state of Oregon on one day to assess the feasibility and validity of the liquid-chromatography method. And longer-term monitoring could quantify and confirm patterns. You can see this upswing in the recreational use of cocaine on the weekend, Field says, as evidenced by increases in some cases starting as early as Thursday. As Guy Allen, plant operator at the Corvallis Wastewater Reclamation Facility, puts it: It’s always interesting to know what’s in the sewage."
From now on i shall be doing my buisness in a bucket and throwing it off the balkony into my neighbours garden .
From now on i shall be doing my buisness in a bucket and throwing it off the balkony into my neighbours garden .
