"forever chemicals" (or xenobiotics) and our friend's cute little pet Axolotl

This is not a ‘piece’ - meaning I am merely attempting to build up a picture around work I intend. And I will be editing previous pieces here as my thinking precipitates into easy themes to attempt to roll out.

One of several themes which to me are entirely connected in one basic ethos - over-consumption of treatment / ‘medicine’ as a whole, is indeed overuse of pharmaceuticals. We all know of antibiotic resistance developing in dangerous pathogens when antibiotics are used in any widespread manner for example. But I have recently been correctly focused on likely even more serious medium term consequences of this for wider humanity.

Many will have heard of the “forever chemicals” such as the unfortunate extremely toxic molecules that began to pervade the whole ecosystem due to the creation of Teflon. See https://chemtrust.org/pfas/ In the cases of many of these chemicals humanity has introduced into our environment the word ‘toxic’ may be a near fatal understatement in that in only minuscule amounts - from perhaps even 4 parts per billion, they can be fatal to all sorts of life.

There are many such chemicals pumped out for the last few generations into the environment. It seems we didn’t learn from our long history with the Roman wonder metal, lead, which after a few thousand years use as piping material was discovered by the later 1800s to indeed damage life, especially that of younger humans.

For the last fifty or maybe more years we have been releasing many substances into the wider (whole planet) environment that have toxic or life-limiting effects we have yet to even fully understand. Just looking up Polychlorinated biphenyls - the infamous PCB, is one more well known tale of good intentions: “carbonless copying paper” sounding like just as new a product only to wonder at as the non-stick pan, when in fact we had invented a new fatal poison that is STILL spreading around the planet despite the ban on their usage. PCBs - in theory banned from the late 70s, are still being seen to increase in our environment around the planet. Last year was said to be the year the highest average rates were observed. And we will have created other “forever chemicals” in the recent past we have yet to even discover do far more harm than any claimed good.

It would require several books to describe to the layman all the likely harms from our modern chemical usage, and that means in almost any ‘unnatural’ product humans utilise, from chemicals (some ‘forever chemicals’) in makeup, to endless other products that we have been marketed demanding that we cannot survive without them. And their combined build up in the environment surely is even more potentially an “extinction event” than global warming. (i mean extinction of humans - we have a very unreliable breeding behaviour compared to many other animals in any event, and many ‘forever chemicals’ do seem to adversely effect fertility).

All of this is summed up in the word ‘xenobiotic’ and i sat with a true world class science expert last week - several decade friend who even oversaw my own Msc thesis, who explained it all rather simply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiotic

what it means in non-technical terms is that man has created or dramatically increased any previous ‘natural’ occurrence, for one reason or another, many new molecules which nature simply has not evolved to ‘break down’. Prior to this new development everything, even rock, will eventually be subject to one of a few quite simple natural systems of breaking the matter down into original atomic form. Even diamonds can in fact ‘naturally’ be broken down into graphite even if over many millions of years time scale.

But with novel ‘forever chemicals’ novel means nature - all of it, has never met these chemicals before and thus there is no system to break these chemicals down. (such processes only evolve over many millions of years). Given many millions of years, maybe even billions, some ‘natural’ new chemistry may well evolve to ‘break down’ these molecules, too…

That’s all pretty scary, but I didn’t know until last week and dinner with my old friend just how this also applies to many pharmaceutical products, too. Many, maybe most, are ‘forever chemicals’. New. Nature has not met them before. Even your humble seemingly fairly innocuous paracetamol - you will pass in mounds as you check out at Lidl

is in fact a forever chemical - it essentially passes through the human body unaltered. Straight into the ‘environment’. Nature has not encountered it before and thus can do nothing to break it down.

Perhaps the real problem here from an environmental or environmentalist’s perspective (we assume will save us from toxic excess) is what is the ‘environment’ ?: We assume municipal sewerage systems will deal with what ends up down the household sink or toilet. But that is not really the case.

In fact thinking on a planetary scale - and we must as once released into the environment ‘forever chemicals’ can be and are distributed around the whole planet by wind or water, municipal sewerage systems even if fully functional (even if they cannot be in respect of forever chemicals as there is no way of breaking them down) are only part of it. Much of the world is either on far smaller domestic sewerage system (septic tank) or entirely inadequate overrun municipal sewerage systems. And there are no viable magic ‘clean up’ chemical processes that neutralise or somehow bind into some process that makes inert these forever chemicals. And then as we know in even small scale extreme weather events - heavier rain or other, all the supposed containment processes go to pot. Forever chemicals that leach into our waters one way or other will either spread out into the waters of the ‘environment’ or eventually end up in some airborne form as the water they were in evaporates for one or other reason. And there are no practical realistic processes to contain them. Our planet is gradually becoming substantially xenobiotic. Whether you live in city or wilderness your whole environment becomes part ‘toxin’.

Years ago it was established that amphibians seem to be particularly susceptible to novel chemicals in their environment. Damp environments - their natural habitat, seeming more prone to life-cycle damage from chemical change.

S/he looks rather bemused… you should be too. In countries like the UK for the last few decades many of his/her cousins simply went rapidly extinct or as good as.

And of course, even if it may not be politically correct to say so, ‘developing nations’ especially places well ‘developed’ with massive expansion of middle class behaviours such as gobbling paracetamol, have even less well developed and maintained municipal sewerage systems…. never mind less regulated medical environments. Serious anti-biotic resistance is a growing problem throughout many such regions, where it remains near ‘Wild West’ in the handing out of these drugs like sweeties.

I have created this almost as a footnote. My friend last week - a world renowned scientist of anaesthetic and pain killers was pretty clear: paracetamol, the NHS seems to pump into people at the rate alcoholics dose themselves with their particular death-knell drug of choice, do just about as much good as said grape….and every single supposedly thoughtful American film for years has some or other normal middle-class character resorting to xanax or some other psychotropic medicine - likely yet more forever chemicals, if even their beloved moggy gets a chill and causes them to have a bad day. That’s one heck of a lot of prosac, xanax or propranolol pee (most forever chemicals ending up excreted down the drains). And doubtless they’ll have their moggies on some ‘mother’s little helper’ too, quite soon ! (massive rates of pet medication is even a larger growth area than human)

I worry for the little cute Axolotl. I do hope his/her mummy can afford a lifetime supply of distilled water. I lie though, in jest… it’s my own pretty clean living kids i really worry for: maybe we have taken the forever chemical so for granted they wont ever have their own kids. And that really will be it.

Solution. My friend says even the best Oxford brainboxes haven’t got a hope of finding some clever ‘biological’ clean-up monster. There always has only ever been one: setting best example (especially as we know to the many immigrant doctors and nurses which our NHS ‘relies’ upon to even exist) . And we haven’t even STARTED yet!