Sludge Watch ==> Teaspoon of sewage is whole city's drug test

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Note that testing for caffeine is a good way to determine sewage sludge 
contamination...since livetock don't drink much cola or coffee.

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Teaspoon of sewage is whole city's drug test

By SETH BORENSTEIN

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a 
drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant.

The test wouldn't be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it 
would help federal law-enforcement and other agencies track the spread of 
dangerous drugs, such as methamphetamines, across the country.

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for 
remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They 
were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are 
taking.

"It's a community urinalysis," said Caleb Banta-Green, a University of 
Washington drug-abuse researcher who was part of the Oregon State team. The 
scientists presented their results Tuesday at a meeting of the American 
Chemical Society in Boston.

Two federal agencies have taken samples from U.S. waterways to see if drug 
testing a whole city is feasible, but they haven't gotten as far as the 
Oregon researchers.

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in 
methamphetamine use from city to city. One urban area with a gambling 
industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet 
methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern 
locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of 
environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field 
said.

Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but 
Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship 
with the sewage-plant operators.

She plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40 
Oregon communities.

The science behind the testing is simple. Nearly every drug — legal and 
illicit — that people take leaves the body. That waste goes into toilets and 
then into wastewater-treatment plants.

"Wastewater facilities are wonderful places to understand what humans 
consume and excrete," Field said.

In the study presented Tuesday, one teaspoon of untreated sewage water from 
each of the cities was tested for 15 different drugs.



Field said researchers can't calculate how many people in a town are using 
drugs.

She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs 
except for cocaine. Cocaine and Ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop 
on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were 
steady throughout the week.

Field said her study suggests that a key tool currently used by drug abuse 
researchers — self-reported drug questionnaires — underestimates drug use.

David Murray, chief scientist for U.S. Office of National Drug Control 
Policy, said the idea interests his agency.

Murray said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is testing federal 
wastewater samples just to see if that's a good method for monitoring drug 
use.


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/21/ap/tech/main3192427.shtml


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August 21, 2007

Flushing Out a Record of Local Drug Use

Researchers have perfected a method of taking a small sample of incoming 
sewage at a water treatment plant and extracting the record of local drug 
use

In the latest attempt to crack down on illegal drug use, scientists say they 
can determine the extent and pattern of illicit drug use—from marijuana to 
heroin to cocaine—by sampling sewage and extracting the telltale 
by-products.

For example, cocaine is snorted, does its brain-altering business and then 
passes through the liver and the kidneys on its way out of the body. It 
emerges in urine as benzoylecgonine and, as that urine travels from toilet 
to treatment plant, it mixes with a host of other by-products of human 
activity.

Environmental analytical chemist Jennifer Field of Oregon State University 
and her colleagues, using an automated system they developed, test small 
samples automatically collected at wastewater treatment plants over a 
24-hour period. Solids are centrifuged out and the sewage sample then 
travels at high pressure through a machine that chemically separates the 
various compounds of interest chemically, such as benzoylecgonine. By 
measuring the relative mass of the various residual chemicals, the chemists 
can then identify what specific drugs have been recently used in that 
community.

"Here's a new tool for taking snapshots of communities over space and in 
time and getting a less biased view of drug use," Field says. Current 
methods, she notes, rely on either self-reporting in surveys or actual 
overdoses. "Certainly compared to the statistics approach, which is waiting 
for people to die," she adds, "this is more real-time."

The technique has been tried in at least 10 U.S. cities, ranging from towns 
with populations hovering around 17,000 people to medium-size cities of 
600,000, according to Fields, though she declined to specify the 
municipalities by name. One trend: use of methadone and methamphetamine (a 
prescription opiate withdrawal aid and speed) remained constant over 24 days 
in these cities, but cocaine consumption routinely spiked on the weekends. 
"You can see this upswing in the recreational use of cocaine as evidenced by 
increases in some cases starting as early as Thursday," of each week 
studied, Field says.

The researchers presented the new drug testing technique at the biannual 
American Chemical Society conference in Boston today and hope to form 
partnerships in the future with interested communities. The work is part of 
a growing trend to monitor drug use via sewage pioneered in the Po River 
valley by toxicologist Roberto Fanelli of the Mario Negri Institute for 
Pharmacological Research in Milan. The U.S. government has undertaken such 
drug-testing experiments since 2006 in more than 30 municipalities, ranging 
from San Diego to Fairfax County, Va. (just outside of Washington, D.C.).

The technique might help communities determine where to apply law 
enforcement or track the success of targeted drug-use prevention efforts, 
the researchers say—for example, helping to get a handle on 
methamphetamine-related deaths in Oregon, which have tripled over the past 
decade. But the strategy also raises privacy concerns, Field says. She notes 
it would be extremely difficult to track individual drug use with this 
method, both because it is hard to reliably estimate from a community-wide 
measure how many individuals are actually using the drug and sampling would 
have to take place almost all the way back in the individual toilet to trace 
it to a particular household. "It's not getting back to the individual," she 
emphasizes.

The next step, Fields says, will be to trace the unique by-products of 
extremely common drugs, such as caffeine and nicotine, to enable even more 
precise readings of local use. "We will be exploring are there ways to use 
human urinary biomarkers to try and assess the population?" she says. "Can 
you follow worker populations? Students moving in and out? And then answer 
questions about trends in drug use."


http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=8A42B810-E7F2-99DF-35FB095D40329638