Might Anti-anxiety Medication Help Our Fish?

By Leonard Ho

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From the Institute of Physics:

Water-polluting anxiety drug reduces fish mortality

A drug that is commonly used to treat anxiety in humans and which regularly finds its way into surface waters through wastewater effluence has been shown to reduce mortality rates in fish.

The results, which have been published today, 8 August, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, may have significant implications for existing standard ecotoxicological tests, which predominantly focus on harmful effects of water contaminants and ignore the potential benefits.

By improving the health of an aquatic organism, a certain pharmaceutical drug may alter the balance of species in an environment and have serious, cascading ecological consequences, according to the researchers from Ume