People on Prozac, fish on Viagra

With all the discussions around climate change, it's no surprise that researchers are increasingly studying the impact of human activity on the environment. This type of research can take many forms ranging from the effects of city lights on the migratory paths of birds to the composition of soil in traditional and organic farming. Beyond research, climate change and other environmental discussions have also changed how we (or at least some of us) act at home. We try to remember to shut the lights. We take shorter showers. We recycle. But there's one sneaky way in which most of us impact the environment, sometimes on a daily basis, without ever thinking about it: when we swallow pills.

Most pharmaceutical drugs, from regular pain killers to chemotherapy drugs, are not fully processed by the body. This means that we end up excreting a proportion of the drugs we swallow, or by-products of those drugs. This leftover pharmaceutical trash ends up in sewage, and eventually makes its way into our aquatic systems.

A recent study by Canadian researchers looked at how low and high concentrations of Prozac, the popular antidepressant, affects the reproductive systems of the goldfish. The news are not good. The researchers found that even low concentrations of Prozac, similar to what could exist in the environment, significantly decreased the volume of sperm the fish produced when they were sexually stimulated. At the rate we're going, we're going to need to feed our fish Viagra to compensate for their antidepressant load.

I wrote a story on this study for The Mark, a Canadian online forum of news, commentaries and debate. You can read the full article here.