By Janet Raloff
Lately, television commercials in Europe and the United States have shown scantily clad women sporting the latest accessory–a contraceptive patch. Impregnated with the same synthetic estrogen that’s in birth-control pills, these plastic bandages are worn for a week and then tossed. Some scientists now worry that because the discards still contain plenty of the hormone, sending them down toilets or into landfills risks harming wildlife.
The patches’ primary hormone, ethinylestradiol, can pass through water-treatment plants and into rivers (SN: 6/17/00, p. 388: Excreted Drugs: Something Looks Fishy), where trace quantities can induce male fish and juveniles of either gender to inappropriately produce an egg-yolk protein (SN: 1/8/94, p. 24: https://www.sciencenews.org/sn_edpik/ls_7.htm). “We have tracked the feminizing effects [of pills’ ethinylestradiol on fish] 2 kilometers downstream from sewage-treatment works,” Joakim Larsson of Göteborg University in Sweden noted in a letter to his nation’s Medical Products Agency (MPA) in Uppsala.