Sewage Sludge As Fertilizer May Alter Gender, Behavior in Lambs

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NEW warnings that a tiny amount of pollution can alter the gender of sheep have sparked fears that it could also affect human health .
Scientists at the government’s Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen have discovered that male lambs exposed to low-level environmental contamination start behaving like females. This has worrying implications, they warn. The toxic soup of industrial chemicals in the air may disrupt human hormones and make people more vulnerable to disease.

“If these results are confirmed by further studies, I believe humans have reason to be concerned about exposure to mixtures of pollutants, even at the very low concentrations present in the environment,” said Dr Stewart Rhind, one of the institute’s leading scientists. These results, combined with many other studies , suggest that exposure to low levels of a mixture of pollutants could result in subtle alterations to human and animal behaviour, and immune and reproductive function.”

People are exposed to small concentrations of thousands of synthetic chemical compounds in the air, in water and in food. Many of them are classed as gender-benders, or “endocrine disrupters”, because they can interfere with natural hormone cycles in the body.

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Rhind and Erhard stress that the contamination does not pose any “direct danger” to anyone who eats lamb. But they are worried it could have “adverse implications” for the reproductive and immune systems of humans, wildlife and domestic animals. Their study was funded by the Scottish Executive’s environment and rural affairs department and appears in the scientific journal Science Of The Total Environment. Although environmental groups approve of sewage sludge as a fertiliser, they are concerned about the “subtle contamination” of the land."

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