In a new study, researchers analysed chemicals in rivers and wastewater in Bath, Bristol, Chippenham, Keynsham and Trowbridge, and found a huge number of substances related to prescription medication, daily activities like showering and dishwashing and drug abuse.
The biggest offenders were found to be painkillers, antibiotics, medications used for heart conditions, mental-health conditions, epilepsy, and lifestyle drugs. The statin atorvastatin was among the most commonly found, as well as the antidepressant fluoxetine.
Past investigations have found the presence of the pill – oestrogen etc. To the point that there was a campaign to make the water companies rebuild the works to clean it out. Not going to happen of course.
What makes me wonder here is if that was present enough to spark that idea a decade back then where’s it all gone now? Or did they just not test for it?
It does seem to explain the lust for more abortions.
Though fair enough it’s probably all that Roe vs Wade nonsense.
“found a huge number of substances”
I note there’s no reporting of actual concentrations. If it’s parts per thousand I’ll worry a lot more than if it’s parts per billion. Unless you’re a homeopath the main concern is that the amounts of E. coli and other faecal bacteria are very low.
As someone who has the misfortune to have to travel to the communist and crime infested city of Bristol on a regular basis, I always wondered why it was a crime and communist infested cack hole? Now the finding of an allegedly huge amount of pharmaceutical substances in the river makes me wonder if there really is ‘something in the water’ that makes Bristol such a horrible communist hell hole? Those who have traveled into Bristol on the M32 and have observed the massive amounts of far left graffiti that the council never seem to want to clean off will know what I mean.
We in Bath are upriver and we piss in it. You know, to give Bristolians a little present, a measure of our esteem?
That “huge number of substances” results from there being too many people on this island. England (408 per sq km) is as densely populated than India (411 per sq km). And still the UK continues to import a million extra people (many of them freeloaders and/or cultural incompatibles) every three years. Those who are liberal on immigration tend to be eco-freaks, yet they never consider the environmental impact of an increasing population.
TW LOL. But Bath is not full of mad commies and eco extremists who try to shut down women’s discussion groups, what makes Bristol different or rather worse? Reminds me of a warning I was once given about the River Wye which is near me. I was told ‘don’t drink the water out of the Wye, the Welsh piss in it’.
“what makes Bristol different or rather worse?”
It’s Bristol. The entire SW knows that no other explanation is necessary.
It’s so weird it was expunged from the normal county system and made a county corporate, like an oyster forming a pearl.
TW . My theory is that Bristol suffers from similar problems to that of Brighton. In both these places there are universities that although they may contain some elements of quality in some academic areas also have a fair amount of less than high quality academic areas such as socialolgy, women’s studies, gender studies etc etc. These thinly veiled propagandist non-subjects attract the less than bright champagne socialist scions of wealthy families and who take up, as far as I can gather, most of the places on these worthless courses.
The thick students doing their worthless degrees invariably vote Labour or Green. The student Lab and Green voters move on after their degree and rarely have to suffer the negative consequences of their vote for the far Left or eco-Communists. After this first lot of students have gone other similar students, attracted by the local communism and non-courses flock to unis like Bristol and Brighton and in turn vote for more Left wingery and eco-Communism. The constant churn of middle class left wing students flowing through Bristol and Brighton ensures that this cohort can always outvote the local people who might only be too pleased to see the back of the middle class Left and their constant litany of failure. The students ensure that the priorities of locals are always second place to the priorities of student ideologues and those who follow them.
The problem of having students in university towns vote for stuff that the settled locals might despise and then moving on and not living with the consequences of their vote is a major problem. It’s the sort of problem that makes me somewhat sympathetic to the idea that students should not vote in the areas where they are studying but in the area they were living before university. It should go without saying that I believe this policy should be a general rule as it would be equally wrong for conservatives to win in uni towns with an unfair uplift from students when that is not something tht the locals might want.
@Fahrenheit211
A fair idea. This is currently done for folks in the military. They vote based on their home of record when they went in. Of course this has led to some shenanigans getting ballots to them as they tend to vote conservative.
@ 211
Takes me back to my schooldays. The word then was: don’t bother applying to Bristol, it’s reserved for upper-class children who couldn’t get into Oxbridge (because of grammar-school boys like us).
This is currently done for folks in the military.
AFAIR only for those serving overseas or at sea. As a serving orfisa I was registered to vote and, indeed be elected as a local councillor (that rule had just changed), in the area in which I was then stationed. But that was in the 1970s so the rules may have changed.
Hugh. That’s an interesting observation about Bristol. It seems to tally with what I’ve observed about the Bristol Left being students or ex students who’ve never done a proper job or would need to do a proper job in their lives.
If I won the lottery and I could afford to go to a University as a mature student to study Government and Politics or something theological or creative, there’s no way on earth would I apply for Bristol. If the left wing knobwittery is bad in Bristol as a whole it must be stifling in the university itself. I reckon that with my views I’d trigger a screaming fit in a college leftie in approximately 15 seconds of meeting them.
Drugs aren’t catalysts. So if these researchers are finding actual drugs, not breakdown products, then there is an awful lot of overprescribing or overdosing going on.
Why not? If I became rich enough to not need to care, I’d go where I could get the most sport out of winding up socialists.
BIW. Yes the sport of winding up the champagne socialists would be fun but it could distract from learning.
@AtC I bet you most of it is in the low ppm and even low ppb range, as in : of interest to researchers, but not to your average person.
HPLC is your friend here, it can find anything at ridonculously low concentrations. It can even find stuff in milli-Q (for the non-labrats, that’s the purest water we can manage, used for really sensitive experiments where even demiwater throws spanners in the works..) if you set up for it.
@ Hugh
Not upper-class – those would, if male, opt for St Andrew’s, Durham or Sandhurst or, if female, a finishing school or one of the non-university colleges in Oxford or Cambridge. Wealthy middle-class: quite probably; big-headed lower middle-class like Will Hutton: definitely.
I was ordered by my school to complete an UCCA form in case I failed to get into Oxbridge and since I had non-academic reasons for avoiding Durham, St. Andrew’s, York and Sussex (even then it was teaching more socialist propaganda than academic courses), Bristol scraped onto the bottom of my list below London (KCL, followed by Imperial and UCL), Manchester and Nottingham.
@Fahrenheit211 – “The problem of having students in university towns vote for stuff that the settled locals might despise and then moving on and not living with the consequences of their vote is a major problem.”
It’;s not that much of a problem because the student who move on are replaced by new student who usually would have voted the same way.
Charles. It may not be much of a problem if there’s a high turnout election but when the most motivated voters are the far left students and it’s a low turnout election then it can become a problem. It ends up with the transient students having an outsized influence and the students rarely stick around long enough to be afflicted by the higher local taxes or other dubious projects t hat are the result of their vote.
I agree with you that the number of lefty students is a finite number of different individuals but this bloc can make a difference.
The ultimate answer, apart from ensuring that students vote in the consituencies tht they have moved to university from unless they leave uni and settle in order to work in the uni constituency, would be for more people to vote and there be less voter apathy. However for tht to happen there needs to be more credible choices on the ballot paper. Brexit was pushed over the line I believe by those who had previously given up on voting but the Brexit Referendum was something for those crapped upon by the political classes to positively vote for.
@john77
Well, yes, looked at more closely. I meant “upwards from us”. A distant view.
@ Fahrenheit211
Quite right!
I can remember actively contested elections being won with a vote of c.10% of the electorate. Of course that is not completely comparable as we did not have a floating student population.
@ Hugh
Ah! Understood.
I got a scholarship to a “middle-class” Public School, thence to Oxford, so I tend to be more precise/pendantic about class distinctions.
@Arthur the cat, Tim W
I note there’s no reporting of actual concentrations
Spot on. Traces from blokes peeing, dogs swimming, children playing, campers washing clothes & dishes…
Study is BS as usual
Pcar.. antidepressives… Nowadays that means the female species “bathing” in open water…
Incidentally… you really *don’t* want to drink the water, nor do such an analysis on the “pristine” waters after …say… salmon spawning season.
The [Attenborough Voice] Heroic Trek leaves a pretty impressive mound of rotting salmon right into the flow, just downstream from the eggs getting fresh water…
Anything downstream that might prey on the eggs cops it.
Ain’t Nature Pretty……
@Theophrastus (2066)
England (408 per sq km) is as densely populated than India (411 per sq km).
In reality it’s significantly worse than that. Central England (roughly between Liverpool, York, Dover and Bristol – not many immigrants head for Gt Yarmouth or Mousehole or Hexham) has a population density over 700/km². Try to find an area of the earth where there are nearly 50 million living in 25,000 square miles and you’re looking at places such as Bangladesh or Java or Greater Tokyo.