Remora

From the WP a story ostensibly detailing another instance of environmental degradation:

"The first nationwide study of pharmaceutical pollution of rivers and streams offers an unsettling picture of waterways contaminated with antibiotics, steroids, synthetic hormones and other commonly used drugs.Of the 139 streams analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 30 states -- including Maryland and Virginia -- about 80 percent contained trace amounts of contaminants that are routinely discharged into the water in human and livestock waste and chemical plant refuse."

But only the naysayers, the nattering nabobs, will jump on this story from the pollution side. Because this is a classic good news/bad news story. See how the liberal press typically showcases the bad side -- when the good news side of it is right in front of their collective noses: here's the solution to the pesky problem of universal health care! The compassionate conservatives can now make the case that health is just a glass of tapwater away from even our poorest citizens! Is this a great country or what? In other countries, to get your steroids, you have to know a doctor. You have to go through the state socialism of a bureaucracy. It is all the Soviet Union out there in the world where the parts aren't American (except for Britain, of course. They love us in Britain. They kiss our butts in Britain. They're crazy to go along with us when we do the darndest things -- oh, like attacking the axis of evil --in Britain. They have Tony Blair in Britain, and he understands our sorta sometimes hostile needs like perfectly!), and people have to queue up at the steroid store to get those necessary muscle builders. Imagine!

There was a story back in October (a month devoted to recoil from 9.11, and thus essentially a blank, as far as news goes, in Limited Inc's mind) in Salon http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/10/25/drugs_water/print.html that has a lot more fun facts to know and tell. For instance, the author, Mark D. Uehling, quotes some water honcho as saying: the presence of "endocrine-disrupting chemicals in potable and nonpotable water has not been established."

But Uehling
notes:

Scientists in Minneapolis presented abundant evidence to the contrary. For one thing, most farmers liberally dose pigs, cows and chickens with hormones. Those male and female hormones are definitely reaching the environment in both liquid and solid animal wastes. Birth control drugs, even steroids used by body builders and pro athletes, are making similar deposits. The question is what effects the chemicals are having, and whether the water (or something else) might be the source. One new clue came from the Mississippi River, where James Levitt of the University of Minnesota studied a variety of fish coping with endocrine mimic-molecules. Levitt compared walleyed pike upstream from a lock, where there were no endocrine mimic-molecules, with fish caught downstream from the lock, where there was plenty of sewage effluent and no shortage of estrogen disrupters.

The male fish swimming in the dirty water had no sperm, and malformed testes. The female fish in the same water had similarly degenerated ovaries
."

The old joke, from W.C. Fields, was that he didn't drink water, because fish fuck in it. The new joke is something like, I don't drink water, because fish can't fuck in it. As they say in the Reader's Digest, humor is the best medecine.