"Streams On Speed Altering Aquatic Food Web"

"Study finds a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs in Baltimore's Gwynns Falls, most likely from city's leaking sewers".

"Baltimore’s streams have a drug problem. Researchers who sampled the Gwynns Falls on the western side of the city found a mix of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in the water, including a byproduct of heroin use.

No one’s going to get high from drinking or splashing in the stream, which flows into Baltimore’s harbor. Nor should they try, because it’s contaminated with raw sewage from the city’s leaky sewer system.

But in a paper published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers report that concentrations of one drug detected there – amphetamine – are great enough to alter the base of the food web that supports fish and other aquatic creatures."

Timothy B. Wheeler reports for the Bay Journal August 25, 2016.