Objective
The development by man of an increasing array of new chemicals and their inevitable release into the environment poses a major threat to ecosystem health. This is particularly true of the aquatic environment, which receives direct discharges of industrial and domestic waste waters as part of man's normal waste disposal system. Recent evidence shows that some of these chemical and effluents can affect wildlife at concentrations much lower than their measured acute toxicity range by specifically interfering with the endocrine system. This can occur by a variety of mechanisms which include mimicry of natural hormones (agonism), blocking hormone receptors (antagonism) and interference with hormone synthesis or metabolism. Evidence of effects at the level of individual organism suggest that these phenomena may be widespread in the aquatic environment but demonstrations of impacts at the level of population, community or ecosystem are rare. Thus, our present state of knowledge implies that endocrine disruption of wildlife may be a widespread and potentially serious environmental problem which will require future management but our knowledge of its true extent and severity is very limited. COMPREHEND is a programme of research to assess the extent of the problem on a Europe-wide basis, to identify the principle components of waste water effluents responsible for endocrine disruption, to search for hard evidence of impacts at the population level and to develop new tools for the early warning of endocrine disrupting activity in effluents and chemicals. It concentrates on the impacts on sexual reproduction in aquatic animals (freshwater, estuarine and coastal) with particular, but not exclusive, reference to fish because the consortium of scientists involved believe that this is the most serious endocrine-disrupting threat to wildlife. Estrogenic mimicry is likely to be an important mechanism in this process and, therefore, a significant proportion of the work programme will be centred around the detection and measurement of estrogenicity of effluents. From recent developments in our understanding of the complexity of estrogen activity within the target tissues, it is argued that reliance on a single screening procedure to detect estrogenicity will not be a reliable predictor of impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Consequently, it is proposed to develop a framework for integrating a range of techniques (chemical, in vitro, in vivo/physiological, life cycle studies, field observations) to assess, with reliability, the potential of an effluent or chemical to impact adversely on aquatic wildlife by interfering with the hormonal control of reproduction. This framework will also act as a generic model for the assessment and management of other forms of endocrine disruption and will include the development of of procedures based on the principles of Toxicity Identification Evaluation (TIE). The consortium is based on the existing EurAqua network of research laboratories and the programme has widespread support from the user community. All the key scientists involved are already very active in this important area of environmental research and the specific objectives are all achievable within the lifetime of the work programme.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processeswastewater treatment processes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrologylimnology
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineendocrinology
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
LA22 OLP AMBLESIDE
United Kingdom