America’s drug addiction is affecting sealife warn scientists

AMERICA’S opioid addiction is beginning to affect the natural world, say scientists, who found shellfish in waters off Seattle had tested positive for drugs.

Taking farmed mussels from clean waters around Whidbey Island, 30 miles north of Seattle, and transferring them to Puget Sound, an estuary on the Seattle coast, they discovered that mussels in three of 18 locations tested positive for trace amounts of the painkiller oxycodone.

Two were near Bremerton’s shipyard and one was in Elliot Bay, near Harbor Island in Seattle. The scientists from the Puget Sound Institute insisted that seafood lovers should not be concerned – the amount present was tiny, and the mussels were growing in areas where shellfish are not cultivated.

But, they said, it was a sign of America’s growing opioid addiction. “What we eat and what we excrete goes into the Puget Sound,” said Jennifer Lanksbury, a biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It’s telling me there’s a lot of people taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound area.”

Previous studies have shown traces of cocaine and other drugs in the mussels, which act as water filters and provide a good analysis of contaminates. But it is the first time opioids have been detected. Mussels are not believed to process drugs like oxycodone, and thus would not necessarily be physically harmed by the presence of it in their tissues, but fish may not be so lucky.

Ms Lanksbury said the results should be a wake-up call. “Hopefully our data show what’s out there, and we can get the process started for cleaning up our waters,” she said. Deaths resulting from drug overdoses have tripled in the US in the past 17 years, to 63,000 in 2016.