The anti-bacterial soap and the toothpaste you use might be damaging the base of the food chain in your local streams. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The anti-bacterial soap and the toothpaste you use might be damaging the base of the food chain
in your local streams. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Chemicals from personal care products, including things such as certain soaps, deodorants, hair
dyes and contraceptives appear to be reducing the number of kinds of algae in streams. Algae is
the base of the food chain for aquatic life. In a report in the journal Nature, University of Kansas
researcher Val Smith and a student exposed algae to the chemicals at levels typically found after
they’ve been through the wastewater plant. The diluted chemicals from the personal care
products killed some kinds of algae in the lab experiment.
“So, that means that these anti-microbials, even though they’re designed to do other things for us,
seem to have a negative effect on something we like which, of course, is algae in streams.”
The next step is to see if the lab findings can be confirmed in the field.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.