Shellfish in Washington test positive for opiods

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SEATTLE (KIRO/CNN) - When people take drugs like opioids, that's not the end of the story.

They excrete those drugs back into wastewater, and a group of researchers found some marine life absorbing those chemicals and testing positive.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife brought in clean mussels from Whigby Island and put them in the water at Elliott Bay by Harbor Island to test the water for pollution.

There's enough opioids in Elliott Bay for mussels to register for that when they're put in the water.

Scientists have discovered oxycodone in mussels when testing water for contamination.

"What we eat and what we excrete goes into the Puget Sound," said Jennifer Lanksbury, Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife."So these are Penn Cove mussels. These are the mussels we use in our analyses."

They deposited mussels into 18 locations. Three of locations came back positive for oxycodone, two near Bremerton and Elliot Bay.

"It's telling me there's a lot of people taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound area. It's likely coming from wastewater treatment plants," Lanksbury said.

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