01-40_WC_149_JUL-AUG26_PT - Flipbook - Page 28
FRESHWATER
“The bottom line is if there’s water being discharged,
it’s likely you’ll find chemicals of concern including
these kinds of chemicals in the environment,” he said.
Currently wastewater plants are not set up to screen
or filter chemicals such as opioids, but “there are lots
of compounds entering into the environment, many
of which we are yet to identify and understand because
society is continually generating new compounds of
concern.”
Other jurisdictions such as Europe have studied
how to remove some of these compounds from
wastewater, he added, but the cost comes in terms of
energy so it’s important to determine levels of risk.
“What is the prevalence of the compounds, what
kind of compounds are they, what is the risk to the
environment and then based on that balance the
trade-offs between energy and costs so you get the net
benefit to society,” Servos said.
Dr. Meghan Fuzzen, a research associate in Dr.
Servo’s lab said concentrations of drugs in the fish they
studied are quite low but “we’re still doing experiments
to determine how much uptake (of compounds) there
is from the water into the fish and what those levels
mean for the fish’s health. We still have work to do
to see if it’s impacting fish in the wild at these low
concentrations.”
University of Waterloo postdoctoral fellow Dr.
Diana Cárdenas-Soracá said proper techniques and
equipment are needed to detect compounds such as
fentanyl and other opioids in bodies of water and fish
are very complicated matrices with biomolecules that
can interfere with analysis.
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WATER C AN ADA • JULY/AUGUS T 2026
“We need to spend some time and effort to be able
to remove that interference and see if the signals we’re
seeing correspond to the compounds we’re interested
in,” Cárdenas-Soracá said.
While scientists can study the effect of drugs on
water-based animals, Cárdenas-Soracá said, techniques
are not yet available that can isolate only one
compound for study.
“We have to balance how much we can quantify
with how much we can invest to remove points of
interference that will potentially disrupt our analysis,”
she said.
She added while the group is working with a
hypothesis that female fish are less affected by the compounds due to “decontaminating” their systems when
laying eggs, they have not yet determined that is fact.
“Some of these compounds are hydrophobic,
meaning they stick to lipids and thus the compounds
will interact more with eggs. When the female releases
the eggs it is something like decontamination,”
Cárdenas-Soracá said.
Fuzzen remarked that the compounds do act on
fish brains and “the fish have very similar mechanisms
to humans such as the serotonin and epinephrine
receptors that we have.”
“There’s potential for disruption of growth and
reproduction when there’s a lot of these compounds
present working in similar manners,” she said.
Fuzzen added the group is studying how
compounds affect behaviours such as response to
predators and social cues “which could alter their
ability to survive in the end.”
WATERCANADA.NE T
University of Waterloo
University of Waterloo postdoctoral fellow Dr. Diana Cárdenas-Soracá.
