Sewage Sludge On Farmland Can Make You Sick

Farm Sewage Sludge a Health Threat

Sun Aug 4, 7:05 PM ET

SUNDAY, Aug. 4(HealthScoutNews) -- You may be anything but flush with health if you live near farm fields fertilized with sewage sludge.

Burning and irritated eyes and lungs, skin rashes and other illnesses are among the problems experienced by residents of homes close to land where Class B biosolids -- a byproduct of the human waste treatment process -- are applied, says a recently published University of Georgia study.

The study included 54 people living near 10 biosolid application sites in Alabama, California, Florida, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas and the province of Ontario in Canada.

Many of the residents had Staphylococcus aureus infections on the skinand in their respiratory tracts. About 25 percent of the people in the study were infected, and two died as the result of septicemia and pneumonia. S. aureus is commonly found in the lower human colon.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn't consider S. aureus to be a significant public health risk, even though it's the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections and is commonly found in sewage, says study co-author David Lewis, a research microbiologist at the university.

Lewis says that chemicals are added when the sludge is being processed. These chemicals can irritate the skin and respiratory tract and make people more susceptible to infection, he said.

In a recent report about biosolids, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences concluded the use of processed sewage sludge as a commercial fertilizer may be a public health risk.

Along with pathogens, sewage sludge can contain household chemicals,heavy metals, pesticides, and synthetic hormones from birth control pills and dioxins.

As we saw last week, sewage sludge is the mud-like material that
remains after bacteria have digested the human wastes that flow
from your toilet into your local sewage treatment plant. If
human wastes were the only substances entering the sewage
treatment plant, then sewage sludge would contain only nutrients
and should be returned to the land.

Unfortunately, most sewage treatment plants receive industrial
toxic wastes, which are then mixed with the human wastes,
creating a poorly-understood mixture of nutrients and industrial
poisons. Furthermore, many American cities have built sewage
systems that mix storm water runoff with the regular sewage;
every time a rain storm scours these cities' streets, additional
toxins are added to the sewage sludge.

As a result, sewage sludge contains a strange brew of nutrients
laced with low levels of PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls];
dioxins and furans; chlorinated pesticides [such as DDT, DDD,
DDE, dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, lindane,
mirex, kepone, 2,4,5-T, and 2,4-D]; carcinogenic polynuclear
aromatic hydrocarbons [PAHs]; heavy metals [arsenic, mercury,
lead, selenium, cadmium, etc.]; bacteria, viruses, parasitic
worms, and fungi;[1] industrial solvents; asbestos; petroleum
products, and on and on. American industry uses roughly 70,000
different chemicals and any of these can be found in sewage
sludge --depending on who's pouring what down the drain at any
given time and place. In addition to the original chemicals,
unique metabolites and degradation products develop anew in
sludge. To give but one example: trimethylamine can be converted
to the powerful carcinogen, dimethylnitrosamine.[2]