Drugs Found In West Virginia Fish

I gotta admit, I love me some fishing in West Virginia.

I first fell in love with the state when we would drive through that part of the country while on vacation when I was growing up.

Something about the simplicity of life there seemed to make a lot of sense with me.

Since then I have done a good deal of fishing there and had some really great days out on the water.

Of course, there are always things that you gotta be careful about when it comes to your catch. You have to be aware of the environment that the fish are in.

I mean, it’s probably not a good idea to fish down stream from a nuclear power plant to give an extreme example.

Which brings me to something extremely concerning.

Researchers from West Virginia University when studying fish indigenous to the area have been finding statins and beta blockers.

For those of you that are blessed not to know, those are heart drugs.

What the researchers theorize is happening is that people are flushing expired heart medicine down the toilet.

Those drugs then begin making their way through a water system and back into the waterways of West Virginia.

The problem lies in the idea that the water treatment plants are not capable of fully flushing out the drugs before they get into the waterways where they mix with the water the fish are swimming in.

Simply put, this is something that this altering the DNA of the fish and can eventually lead to many problems down the road.

It is something where we need to exercise greater care for the world around us. The fish simply cannot process heart medicines the way we do and this will eventually lead to some major health issues for those that eat the fish that are tainted with flushed heart medicine.

Hopefully we can come up with a better way of disposing of drugs than simply flushing down the toilet.

It’s one of those things that we don’t really think about until we are presented with how bad the situation could possibly get.