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While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.According to the National Catholic Register, EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo., two years ago.When they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city's sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange "intersex" fish with male and female features.It's "the first thing that I've seen as a scientist that really scared me," university biologist John Woodling told the Denver Post.The main culprits were found to be estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches that ultimately ended up in the creek after being excreted in urine into the city's sewers.The Register says Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor David Norris, and the EPA team were among the first scientists in the U.S. to learn a cocktail of hormones, antibiotics, caffeine and steroids is flowing through the nation's waterways, threatening fish and contaminating drinking water."Nobody is getting passionately concerned about it," Norris said. "It makes no sense to me at all that people aren't more concerned."The problem is not just limited to Boulder.Similar stories have been reported from coast to coast.In western Washington, experts found synthetic estrogen-commonly found in oral contraceptives-drastically reduces the fertility of male rainbow trout.Doug Myers, wetlands and habitat specialist for Washington State's Puget Sound Action Team, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that in frogs, river otters and fish, scientists are "finding the presence of female hormones making the male species less male."Two years after the Boulder findings, there has been no effort among environmentalists to stop the estrogen pollution of Boulder Creek.Dave Georgis, director of the Colorado Genetic Engineering Action Network which has been vocal against genetically modified crops, said, "It just has so much competition out there for stuff to work on."He told the Boulder Weekly nobody needed to think about cutting back on birth control for the creek's sake."You can't have a zero impact, and this is one of the many, many impacts we have on the environment in everyday life," Georgis said."Nobody is to blame for this, and I don't have a solution."....
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